It's been a long while since I've been moved by a film. Not just moved, but hurting my insides and traumatizing my brain long after. On Saturday night I went to see Better Luck Tomorrow. While watching the movie, I couldn't sit still, and later kept getting up and walking around in the back of the theater watching it and hoping it would end soon. Not because it wasn't good, but because it hit too close to home. I'm still not completely clear why it hit home for me so much, but it did. I spent the whole night unable to fully sleep and wanting to cry or scream or wish things were different.

I think part of it was that I was always one of those types of kids, like in the movie, who was the "good" kid, who overachieved in school, who took extra credit assignments, who wanted to please everyone and better my future. But as the movie showed, there's this darker side to that and so many people easily look over it because everyone wants to believe the "good kids" are always good and always perfect and always right and they can't see the full human being inside.

For the kids in the movie, their "dark" side was everything from cheating to drugs to violence, and they got away with so much because no one in authority ever suspected they would be the ones doing this stuff. For me, my "dark" side was being Gay. I'm not equating being Gay with cheating/drugs/violence/immorality here. I'm equating my feelings about being Gay when I was young, before coming out, to being a horrible human being. I'm equating my feelings about being Gay when I was young to that of being under the radar of the rest of the world. I'm equating my feelings about being Gay when I was young to the notion that everything isn't always "perfect," or "rosy," or "good."

I always felt as if I was horrible and evil, but no one could see it, and I did my best to hide it and conceal it for fear that I would ruin everyone's "perfect picture." And so, for me, reality was "dark" and I didn't want to live in reality. I hated reality. I wanted to pretend and hope for perfection and I strived to be in that place. And I hoped and prayed my heart out. And I became obsessive-compulsive about praying. And nothing ever made the reality go away.

In the movie, the kids end up unsure about their futures and afraid to let their dark sides be known. In my life, reality caught up with my "perfect image" when I couldn't take it anymore and finally just blew the closet door open. But even though I did come out and I now know that being Gay is not a negative or a "dark" thing, I still have those left-over feelings and internal baggage from when I was a child and teenager that are just below the surface of my emotions. And, sometimes, upon the right type of prompting, they come out to haunt me again.