{"id":64009,"date":"2021-10-08T14:02:58","date_gmt":"2021-10-08T21:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=64009"},"modified":"2021-10-11T14:37:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T21:37:13","slug":"my-coming-out-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/my-coming-out-story\/","title":{"rendered":"My coming out story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Grace<\/a>By Grace Huang Ditsworth\u00a0(They\/Them)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Project manager in ITS<\/h3>\n
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As a mixed-race queer person, I\u2019ve spent my life \u201ccoming out\u201d over and over again from a young age. To me, coming out is not a singular moment. Instead, it\u2019s a familiar split in the road that I come to many times a day. Coming out is a process of wayfinding\u2014of aligning myself to myself and directing others to find and recognize me.<\/p>\n

Right now, I identify as mixed-race (Hakka Chinese and White), pansexual\/queer and nonbinary\/agender, among other emerging and evolving identities. I started bumping up against normative social structures when I was young due to being visibly mixed-race. I felt both inside and outside of elementary school in Tempe, Arizona (protected and loved by friends; made fun of for bringing pungent fish to school; told to translate into English when speaking Chinese with my mom) and inside and outside at my grandparents\u2019 farm in NanZhuang, Taiwan (admired for my pale skin and good Chinese \u201cfor a white person;\u201d teased for my soft city-kid hands).<\/p>\n

As a light-skinned person with an ethnically ambiguous appearance, people have always asked invasive questions about me and my family to try to position us into their own narrative of who we are in the world. I\u2019ve received privilege and praise that I didn\u2019t want or deserve; other times I\u2019ve been misread and misunderstood until I asserted my identity. Multiple aspects of how I identify now are invisible unless I\u2019m with a partner or out myself. Even when I do assert myself, I\u2019m never sure what to say about who I am. There\u2019s always something that I could be leaving out, maybe the one thing that could make me understood. There is always more that I could say.<\/p>\n

When I think about \u201ccoming out,\u201d I don\u2019t think of one particular moment in time when things changed for me. Rather, my life has involved a series of \u201csliding door moments\u201d<\/a> (as psychologist John Gottman calls them) when I chose to move into greater authenticity and intimacy in my relationships, or when I decided it was not the safe or right path at the time.<\/p>\n

Some \u201csliding door moments\u201d I remember well:<\/p>\n