Looking at my late-90s high school diary, you would assume I was a regular horny straight teen girl. The reality was very different | Rebecca Shaw

A few weeks ago while living through hell (moving house), I stumbled upon my late-90s high school diary, the one that I would take to class every day in regional Queensland. It is an artefact of its time, before newfangled technology like laptops and having the internet in other places besides one room of your school. It’s also an artefact of its time in another important way: it is completely covered in images of hot guys of the time.

Looking at it, you would assume that I was a regular horny straight teen girl, cutting out photos of Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith and Hanson to plaster all over my diary so the world could see my very-normal-don’t-look-too-closely-ha-ha desire for men. Well, it may shock you to learn that I wasn’t a normal straight teenage girl. I was a deeply closeted and sad teenage lesbian. I knew that something was different about me from about 11, even though at the time I hadn’t met any gay people, there were no gay people in pop culture, and there was no Google to ask “why am I weird”.

It took me a long, long time to figure it all out, and even longer to feel safe telling anyone. Six or seven years after realising I was queer, I was still carefully choosing photos of men to pretend to be into, spending hours figuring out ways to remain undiscovered. I would continue this charade until I was about 22, when I finally came out. This is an effect of marginalisation, of discrimination and hate that doesn’t get spoken about enough. The amount of time, the amount of brain space, the amount of ENERGY it takes to live not as yourself is remarkable, and draining.

Rebecca Shaw’s teenage diary. Photograph: Rebecca Shaw

I also visited my home town last week for the first time in over a decade. Even though I am now 42 years old, have lived an extremely loud gay Sydney life for years, and was there holding hands with my girlfriend, I felt a heaviness in my chest. Remembering that time means acknowledging the years that I lost, because society didn’t or wouldn’t understand me. It means thinking about what I could have done or been if I hadn’t used so much of my brain space on trying to hide myself, change myself, be anything but the real me. Instead of thinking about school and my real crushes and my future, I had to shut myself down, focusing on my differences and how to minimise them.

I thought about all of the energy that the LGBTQI community has had to expend over decades; so much fighting to move forward inch by grudging inch. How tired we all are, having worked this hard to get this far, only to see our progress backsliding again in the face of rising anti-LGBTQI hate, pushed by politicians all over the world. I thought about the energy levels of the people in my community who have to fight even harder, like those who aren’t white and those who aren’t cisgender.

While on a break from writing this (scrolling on another screen), I saw an Instagram post from comedian Mae Martin about their journey, and this bit struck me: “Transitioning unlocked a whole new part of my brain, and freed up a lot of mental space that had previously been occupied by anguish.”

Picking out photos of boys to paste on to my diary as a teenager and spending my days terrified about being found out – that was an easy version of all of this. When I think about how much of my brain space has been taken up by the stress of being gay in a homophobic world, and I compare that to what my trans friends have to go through, to deal with and stay safe in the rampant transphobia of society in whatever ways they can – I can’t even imagine.

Thinking about how much energy we all use up just trying to exist, I couldn’t help but consider the flipside. The energy that is used against us, to push back our rights, or attack us. The energy politicians are expending both overseas and at home on fighting queer and trans people is a disgraceful waste and a distraction. In Australia, where people are struggling to pay bills and buy groceries and insure their homes against climate change events, the Coalition is using its energy to talk about the “woke” agenda in schools ahead of the election. In the US, the Trump administration is spending its energy on a similarly misguided scourge of “wokeness”. But where young queer people often have no choice but to spend most of their energy on keeping themselves safe – these governments and people in power do have a choice.

I have unlimited energy to keep fighting for our community, we are not going anywhere – I would just rather we all got to use our energy for living true and good lives instead.

Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney