The Power of a Pause: A Coming Out Story and a Social Revolution
By: Till Kaeslin
Tags: Personal Development, Social Change, LGBTQ, BlackLivesMatter, Coming Out

The Power of a Pause: A Coming Out Story and a Social Revolution

With nowhere to go but toward the uncomfortable truth, this is our chance to think, to talk, to hurt, and to change.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Through a quick Google search, I found that a “pause” is defined as, “a temporary stop in action or speech.”

We all know this, of course, but I took a second to Google it anyway, just to make sure that it’s exactly the right word for what I’m trying to convey.

As it turns out, it’s the perfect word.

While a pause can invoke many different emotions — edge-of-your-seat suspense, wordless pain, mind-numbing boredom — it is always thought-provoking.

When people are given time to think, questions start being asked; when people start asking questions, scars are exposed; when scars are exposed, change starts to simmer.

I know this because I’ve experienced the power of a pause myself.

I was 16-years-old, and I had just moved halfway across the world, from Hong Kong, China to a small town in suburban Connecticut. It wasn’t totally foreign to me — I’d lived there for three years when I was little — but it didn't feel like I was coming home. Too much time had passed, and I barely recognized the place, let alone my old friends.

If you add together three big factors:

I was well into my moody-teen phase. I had no friends to hang out with. There was a solid three weeks ahead of me before the school year started and I could actually meet anyone.

— you could imagine that I spent a lot of time in my room, alone.

I was fresh off of a quick transition from a busy, action-packed life:

Overzealous last nights out and sad goodbyes with old friends in Hong Kong, followed by a whirlwind, international move, bouncing from family friends’ couches to stiff hotel room beds — it was exhausting.

But then, as the dust had settled on my new life, there I was, laying on my bed, twiddling my thumbs and staring at the ceiling — only the occasional vibration of wooden furniture scraping across the floor below me to disturb my boredom.

Quite suddenly, I was paused.

For the first time in a long time (possibly ever), I had nothing to act on and no one to speak to.

This is when I began to think, to hurt, and, eventually, to change.

If you’ve ever just laid in bed just staring at the ceiling, then you’ll know that it’s never just laying in bed and staring at the ceiling. From the outside in it may look like lazy inaction, but inside you’re on fire.

It was in these moments that I first started to rustle through the deepest compartments of my mind that I had unknowingly banned from my conscience long ago.

‘Who am I? What do I like? Who do I like?’

I noticed that that last question bothered me more than any of the others, as if it was some subconscience anxiety trigger. Like a suspiciously upbeat character in a TV drama, I knew I had something to hide, so, without anything else to do, I became my own detective.

Around a month later, I came out to myself.

One month after that I came out to my best friend over Skype. A year later, I was out to anyone that cared to ask.

Would I have gotten there in a year had I not experienced that uncomfortable moment of pause? I don’t think so.

When it comes down to it, I think I came out when I did because I had nothing left to distract me from my uncomfortable truth.

When my seemingly endless pick of distractions had suddenly exhausted itself, I had nothing left to do but to ask questions, which then opened up the possibility for change, for growth, and for greater happiness.

What we’re experiencing now is a moment of pause.

In fact, it just might be the largest, most ubiquitous moment of pause in the history of mankind. And it’s still stretching on ahead of us — stay-at-home orders may be heaving their last breath, but the fact remains that most of our busy lives won’t be back to what they once were for a long time to come.

This pandemic pause, like any prolonged pause, has forced free the kind of time and space with a volume so large that it’s inevitably filled with a lot of thinking.

In its wake, we as a society have once again uncovered long-unattended scars, now more like festering wounds, just below the surface.

Just as my 16-year-old mind had decided to lock away the parts of me that it deemed too painful and too uncomfortable to deal with, the world, in its business-as-usual state, had suppressed systemic issues into shelved, long-forgotten boxes of its own.

The murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and of so many other black men and women at the hands of not just their racist killers, but a racist system, has once again shaken those shelves long doomed to collapse.

But unlike the long history of similar racially charged protests and movements that have taken place over the past 400 years, this time people have been completely free to think.

In an age when we are told to stay home from work and socially distance ourselves from our friends and family, there is nowhere to go but toward the uncomfortable truth.

There is nowhere to go than online, where #blacklivesmatter is trending, black voices are being reposted, encouraged and amplified, and tense, hard discussions are unfolding. And once we log off of our apps and reengage with the “real world”? There is still no way to avoid the topic. Whether over the phone or over the dinner table, when someone asks “what’s new?” and you’ve been reliving the same, Groundhog Day-esque existence for the past three months, where else to turn for material than the only thing that any media outlet has been talking about for weeks?

Truth is all around us, and it’s constantly making itself known — I firmly believe that.

But the difference between truth bringing about real change in the moment has little to do with the intensity of the truth itself and everything to do with how little we have in our way to avoid it.

Today, as things are now, we have next to nothing standing in our way of facing the uncomfortable truth of a system built on, and riddled with, grotesque instances of injustice.

This is our chance to think, to talk, to hurt, and to change.

We won’t get another opportunity quite like this.