How the TV series Sex Education helped me come out later in life

Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.

I was watching an episode of Sex Education, the British teen drama about high schoolers discovering their sexuality, gender identity, and sex with varying degrees of certainty and success. This was something I didn't do until my late 30s, not realizing I was queer until after I married a man and had a child.

I felt as if I was witnessing the full spectrum of the teen struggle: Eric's efforts to belong in a family and church that didn't understand him; Aimee first claiming her sexuality beyond the male gaze of her boyfriend and then reclaiming it after a sexual assault; Adam overcoming internalized homophobia and toxic masculinity and letting love into his heart, from himself and others. 

The show's empathy for the human condition, and the teenage experience in particular, was overwhelming. I related to the feeling that no one understands you and of being utterly alone, no matter how many of your peers surround you, because they're all battling their own demons too. I teared up over this thoughtful representation, which I knew would go beyond the screen to touch real people's lives, saving many from a lifetime of shame, confusion, and inauthenticity. It's all the lessons I wish for my younger self packaged into one show.

But this emotion abruptly turned on me and into something else: a wave of sadness over not having had representations like this to shepherd or save me. My tears became a full-blown waterfall as I felt the weight of the years I'd needlessly lost. 

I grieved for the teen who felt different without understanding why and had no one to guide her, in person or on TV. Like many of the characters on the show, I spent a lot of time on my own in my bedroom, dealing with my angst and confusion and not understanding myself or the world around me.

Although I have two sisters, they're much older than me (by six and 10 years) and in our Eastern Orthodox community and first- and second-generation Macedonian and Ukrainian immigrant family, queerness was either absent from the conversation or spoken about negatively. 

If only I'd had a proper sex education rather than the sanitized lessons about the body we had in Catholic school. And then there were the judgmental speeches from the priests at our church, which relegated sex to marriage and only made me more closed off to my own sexuality. If only I'd known just a smidgen about the world beyond my tiny one. 

Only as an adult have I been able to find my own spirituality after feeling suffocated by my religion growing up. But in Sex Education, I watched Eric embrace spirituality beyond the prescriptions of his Christian church. 

I watched young women in the show have sex without shame and for their own pleasure — something I've only been able to truly do after coming out as queer. It's taken me years to shed the shame I learned when I was young. On the show, I watched teen after teen have the bravery to ask Otis, who runs a sex clinic at school, or his therapist mother, Jean, questions about sex — to ask for help when they were floundering. There was someone close by, someone who cared, willing to help them find an answer. 

I watched a show where sex and sexuality not only existed, but also asserted itself unapologetically as an essential part of our lives — in stark contrast to my own upbringing, where we all pretended it didn't exist. I can still recall the discomfort of watching TV with my family when the topic of sex would come up — not even explicit sex, but subtle references, like on Friends or Seinfeld. Pretend you don't get it, I'd say to myself, my body tense until the scene ended. We were all acting at home too.

The need to forgive myself for not realizing sooner that I was queer returns often. My feelings of regret are like the wick of a candle that has been lit before and takes just the faintest brush of a flame to reignite. 

There are painful reminders of my tardiness everywhere: on dating apps; sitting in a group of couples; meeting young queer people who seem so self-assured; on shows like Sex Education, where being queer or questioning your sexuality is so normal and common. 

I grieve for those lost years, sometimes wrongly assuming that people who came out earlier are so much closer to being their truest selves, as though coming out earlier sets off a chain reaction with more things done "right" and less time lost. 

I envy people who came out sooner, and my it grows more profound the younger the person was when they came out. If the person was in their early 30s, my envy is mild but still palpable; if they were in their 20s, it grows deeper; and if they were a teen or younger, my whole self is filled with it. 

I realize coming out early can be painful in different ways — you could be bullied in school and face disapproval or even expulsion from your family, for example — but my mind doesn't go there; it goes to what I think I've missed. On my worst days, my life can feel like a series of mistakes. 

Coming out later in life made me feel like a teen again. It allowed me to live a second adolescence in midlife, with first kisses, intense feelings, new crushes and fresh heartbreak. When I see the teens on Sex Education going through those same things, empathy comes quickly and deeply, because the feelings don't feel as far in the past as they normally would for someone in their 40s. 

It also reminds me of the possibility of holding conflicting feelings at once: joy and sadness, community and alienation, gratitude and regret. 

The show speaks to different versions of me — the teen one, the questioning one, the adult one — and reminds me that everyone's journey is different and we're not alone, no matter how alone we feel.