They look at me with their eyes, but they don’t actually see  me. They hear me with their  ears, but they  don’t actually listen to me. I am Judged by the students that I pass while walking through the halls of school. Judged every second I am in my home by my parents. In this day and age people judge you on your physical appearances more than your own moral character.

As for me, I am a bisexual Asian-American, who was raised in a small town in Hawai’i. It seems that when I was born I was already put at a disadvantage. Most people’s families that live here have been in this town for generations and have never left. Considering that, they haven’t yet experienced change or being out of their comfort zones. Which leads to close-mindedness. No matter what, my peers will always see me as the “Jap-kid,” or “Coin-Slot Eyes” or even that “Bi Kid.” They take one look at me and have made their decision on “who I am.” I don’t let those remarks define who I really am, however I let them serve as an example of how I can be the bigger person and show what my moral principles are.

The first time I had ever felt what it was like to be judged by others was when I moved schools in the 2nd grade. I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school starting at pre-K. My first day at a public school I could feel everyone’s eyes staring at me and the horror that filled me while walking through the halls as I watched people whisper about me. But the one thing that reassured me, every-time I walked into class, was a banner that was hung up at the front wall of the classroom right above the whiteboard which my teacher called “The Golden Rule.” It read, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” As a 7 year old kid, I thought that rule was pretty simple and that it wasn’t hard to break. My 6th grade year was all about preparing us for middle school and a little bit of high school. The teachers were more strict and my peers and I had matured somewhat from our younger age. We had started to learn about World War 2 during Social Studies and this being my favorite subject I was excited. We started off the unit with the Attack on Pearl Harbor. I was sitting down in the front row and someone shouted “Austen’s grandpa attacked Pearl Harbor,” in front of the entire class. I was confused and I felt so embarrassed for being Japanese and looking this way. The next couple of days  it happened again. I was walking in front of one of the other 6th Grade classes and I looked inside and someone shouted “Look it’s one of the Japanese that bombed us!” I started to have an identity crisis about whether I should start lying that I wasn’t Japanese and deny my ethnical background. When the subject of World War 2 was over I could finally take a breath of fresh air and hope that no one would bring it up again. However this wasn’t the last time I felt like that. Like I had to hide myself all over again 

Like I mentioned beforehand, I am also bisexual. It took awhile for me to come to the realization that I wasn’t straight and that I was born this way. In middle school I started to become more aware of the fact that I felt an attraction to people of the same-sex but I tried to suppress those feelings. My parents aren’t the religious type of folk but they think that anyone who dates someone of the same-sex isn’t right in the head and that they have a problem. All I ever wanted was to make them proud. However, knowing that this was their view on people that were non-heterosexual, they’d react as if the world were ending. I had no one to talk to about my feelings and it felt like I was hiding behind a mask for years. What made it worse was that I became more active on social media and watched a lot more of the news and witnessed a lot of post and news reports of hate crimes committed against people who were like me. The worst was when I learned about the Pulse Nightclub shooting and it felt like I had to protect myself from ending up like one of the 50 killed. That was until I hit high school, I started to make new friends and they made me feel more comfortable from when I used to jump around the different groups of students. Freshman year went by and then I met someone online who talked to me about his experiences of being closeted and I admitted that I was bisexual and it was the first time and actually said it out loud to someone. As the rest of my high school years went by, I felt more proud of myself that I was able to talk about it without being embarrassed by anyone who asked. I told a lot of my cousins and a few aunties and uncles but wasn’t ready for my parents. I had started dating this guy from a different school and we were both closeted but still went out on dates and hangouts together. That was until my mom confronted me on why I kept going out almost every weekend and seeing this “friend.” So I came out to her and told her everything. She was furious. She questioned why I would do something like this to the family. She said “We raised you to be a man...we raised you to be straight.” By this time almost everyone in my grade level knew about me but did not care that I was bisexual because they knew me as Austen. They knew me as someone they could talk to so they didn’t feel alone. I understood that feeling of having no one and being at rock bottom.

Going on into the next chapter of my life, I want to address these stigmas within my future career in political science. I plan on applying the knowledge that I will gain from this course in order to advocate for those who feel the same judgement as I did. Show people that we can make a difference by being open minded to various different lifestyles. 

Headline Photography by Ms. Fitzgerald | The Waialuan Advisor & Teacher