The Path I Almost Didn’t Choose

I still remember sitting in my second year of college looking at a schedule filled with music education classes and U.S. history courses and believing I knew exactly what my future was going to look like.

There was something comforting about the certainty of it. I was going to have my own classroom. I was going to direct concerts, teach students to find their voices, and hopefully become the kind of educator who saw something special in a young person before they could see it in themselves.

At nineteen or twenty years old, the path in front of me seemed incredibly clear.

And then, slowly and quietly, it changed.

I cannot point to a single newspaper article, a single conversation, or a single moment where everything shifted. It was the accumulation of stories. A teacher investigated. Another teacher fired. Another educator whose entire career became secondary to who they loved.

Somewhere between the headlines and the whispered conversations in hallways, the message became impossible to ignore.

We spend so much time telling young people that they can be anything they want to be: a scientist, an artist, a musician, a teacher. For most people, that statement is offered as a promise.

For many queer people of my generation, there was a quiet condition attached to that promise.

You can be anything you want, as long as being yourself does not get in the way.

That was the reality I was watching unfold in the 1990s.

I watched talented educators around me become smaller versions of themselves so they could blend in with their heterosexual colleagues. I watched people move away from the communities where they taught so they could build a home with their partner somewhere they were less likely to be recognized.

I watched extraordinary teachers spend more energy protecting their private lives than celebrating the work they were doing in their classrooms.

They were not losing their careers because they were bad educators.

They were not losing them because they failed their students.

They were losing them because they loved the wrong person.

That is a sentence that still hurts to write.

Because I knew what it meant.

I knew that I could choose the classroom I had always imagined, but I might also spend every day wondering whether a conversation, a photograph on my desk, or the wrong person asking the wrong question could take that dream away.

So I changed the shape of the dream.

I did not become the music educator standing in front of a public school classroom.

I became the music educator who built a private studio, worked with school systems as a contract teacher, and made a career as a performing musician.

I taught thousands of lessons. I worked with students of every age. I had the occasional day where a student practiced exactly as much as you would expect a teenager to practice, and I created a career that was entirely my own.

No one could fire me from my own business.

Even writing that sentence now feels strange.

There is something profoundly sad about realizing that the safety of your professional future was one of the reasons you made the choices you did.

But fear does not always announce itself in dramatic ways.

Sometimes it just quietly sits beside you while you make decisions.

And even after I created that safety, I did not suddenly become fearless.

The truth is, people knew.

They knew because human beings are often far more observant than we give them credit for.

But during the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” knowing and acknowledging were two very different things.

I did not keep photographs of my partner on my desk.

I did not casually mention my relationship the way many of my heterosexual colleagues could.

I did not spend time in the communities where I taught unless I was there as part of a larger group.

I was not lying.

But I was not living openly either.

I was hiding in plain sight.

For years, I considered those choices normal.

That is perhaps the strangest thing about living with fear for a long time. You stop recognizing how much space it occupies.

You stop noticing the calculations.

The edited stories.

The moments where you answer a simple question with a version of the truth instead of the whole truth.

You become fluent in a language you never wanted to learn.

And that is why the world we are living in right now feels so familiar.

The older I get, the stranger it feels to watch conversations from my childhood and early adulthood return with new vocabulary and different headlines.

I recognize the feeling of watching people debate whether certain groups deserve the same dignity, opportunities, and freedoms as everyone else.

I recognized it when I was a young queer person trying to imagine my future.

And today, I recognize that same feeling when I watch my LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, people of color, and women once again become topics of debate instead of human beings with lives, families, hopes, and dreams.

I have lived long enough to know where that kind of thinking can lead.

And I have also lived long enough to know that silence has never been what moves us forward.

The younger version of me stayed quiet because she was trying to protect her future.

I have compassion for her.

She was doing the best she could with the world she had.

But I am no longer that person sitting in a college classroom wondering whether honesty would cost me everything.

I have a voice now.

I have a wife I love.

I have a community that knows me exactly as I am.

I have a life I built with intention, creativity, kindness, music, coffee, Star Trek conversations, laughter, and all of the ordinary beautiful moments that make a life a life.

And I still think about that college schedule sometimes.

The one filled with music education classes and history courses.

The one held by a young woman who thought she knew exactly where the road ahead would lead.

She was wrong.

The classroom she imagined was not the classroom she received.

There are students I never taught.

Concerts I never conducted.

A version of my life I will never get to know.

Sometimes I wonder if there was a student sitting in one of those classrooms who needed a teacher who understood what it felt like to be different.

And I can hold that grief.

But I can also look at the life I built and recognize something equally important.

I taught anyway.

It just looked different than I imagined.

I made music anyway.

I built a business anyway.

I found the love of my life anyway.

I created a home anyway.

I found joy anyway.

Fear changed the route.

It did not get to choose the destination.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.