Challenges, Questions, Trauma. And Hope.
Noah Mayer

	There were two things I really wanted out of my Notre Dame experience when I first arrived. I wanted a social environment that was large enough for me to find my niche, my people, and I wanted classes that interested and challenged me. Given the size of Notre Dame and its academic clout, I would judge this as a fairly low bar, and Notre Dame has cleared it easily. But there were a great many things, both bad and good, that I had not anticipated encountering at Notre Dame, although some of them I perhaps should have seen coming.
	Within the first week of classes, it had become rather obvious that guys’ dorm life at Notre Dame was not something for which I was cut out. The three pillars of mainstream male social interaction at Notre Dame are alcohol, women, and sports. I happen to be interested in precisely none of those things. The larger culture at Fisher, and I’m sure at many other men’s dorms as well, are dominated by those three things, and so while I have never felt unwelcome I did and still do feel distinctly out of place in Fisher. This was only compounded by the fact that the culture at Fisher, specifically when it comes to women and alcohol, is not only contrary to my personal tastes but also unhealthy and perhaps even dangerous.
	What this means for me is two things. If I desire a community where I can safely and comfortably by myself, I need to look outside my own dorm. We read that “community is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received” (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Community,” Parker J Palmer, Moreau FYE Week 11). And this is true to the extent that we should not view communities as projects to be improved upon. But sometimes we need to go out and find community instead of waiting for it to find us, and that is what I have tried to do at Notre Dame, and I have had success in doing it, in finding community outside my dorm where I feel I can be fully myself and where I can flourish. But even given that, I am still a part of the Fisher community. “I cannot pretend to stand outside it. I am woven into it” (“Wesley Theological Seminary 2012 Commencement Address,” Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., Moreau FYE Week 10). And so I am called to do something about the culture. Not by remaking it in my own image, or treating it as a project to be worked on, but rather by working with the others within Fisher to make it safer and more healthy. And that starts with conversations, often difficult, unpleasant conversations, but ones I think need to be had about the culture within Fisher and whether its really what any of us want.
	
	If you had asked me a year ago what I thought I would find at Notre Dame, questions about my sexual identity would never have crossed my mind. I was 100% certain that I was heterosexual, without even a glimmer of a doubt. But at Notre Dame I met a friend who was asexual. I had never met any asexual people before, and I was curious, so I asked some questions about what asexuality was and what it was like. And their answers were unsettlingly familiar. So I asked some more questions, I did some research online, I talked with some of my closest friends. In the space of five days, I realized that one of the core parts of my identity was not what I thought it was. I was asexual, and probably aromantic as well. It is hard to describe the feelings that I experienced in the next days and weeks. On the one hand, there was a sense of relief, of a weight being lifted. I had been pressed by expectations, both my own and those of others, into seeking out a girlfriend for the past nine years, and now I could finally let that go and live my own life (“Why Letting Go of Expectations is a Freeing Habit,” Julia Hogan, Moreay FYE Week 9). On the other hand, there was a sense of anger. I had spent nine years chasing after something I had never really wanted to begin with, and I place the blame for that squarely on the popular culture that showed me happy, smiling, blissful couples in every book and movie and tv show, that told me again and again how wonderful love was, how life-changing it would be once I found it. Well it turns out I neither want nor need romantic love, and they could have told me that was a possibility before I spent nine years chasing it. Finally, there was a profound sense of isolation, of not belonging, of being neither seen nor understood. Name one asexual person in mainstream media. I can’t. Multiple times, when I came out to a friend, they told me some variation of “you’ll grow out of it.” I was forced to identify myself as ‘other’ when a survey asked me about my sexuality. Day after day, I am faced with constant, subtle reminders that I am not normal, that I am ‘other,’ that I do not fit in, do not belong.

	One final thing I encountered at Notre Dame was not actually something I found here but something I had brought with me from my own past. To say I had a bad high school experience would be putting it lightly. Academically, everything was stellar. I did well in all of my classes, and I had good relationships with my teachers. Unfortunately, I did not have good relationships with my classmates. I went to a small school, only thirty of us were in my graduating class, and most of my classes were segregated by gender, so there were even less of us in the classroom. Day in and day out, for six years, I was stuck with the same eleven other boys. And about half of them got on my nerves in the worst ways possible. At times, they bullied me directly, but for the most part they were just loud, obnoxious, misogynist, and racist in my vicinity. The handful of times I spoke out against them and their behavior, they went after me for it. And most of the time I was too focused trying to hold myself together to say anything. It was not until I arrived here at Notre Dame that I realized just how bad things were at my high school. There was a large amount of time in my sophomore and junior years that I wanted to kill myself or to kill one of my classmates. There were two instances I self harmed, and many more times I thought about it. In the past few weeks, I have been confronting all the trauma that experience has left me with, trauma which, until now, I had not realized I had. But I recognize now that it has left me with emotional and mental scars, with a distrust of and distaste for men my own age, with a lingering feeling of isolation despite the friends I have made here at Notre Dame.

	If these three things were the only things I had encountered at Notre Dame, I would likely be miserable right now. But fortunately, I encountered something else as well. I encountered hope. Even in my darkest times at Notre Dame, I’ve found support from those around me, from my professors and instructors, from my peers and classmates, and from the leadership in my hall. I know that even when I stumble and fall, as I have and no doubt will again in the future, even when it seems like the darkness is closing in all around me, that I can still have hope in myself, in my brothers and sisters, and in Christ (“Holy Cross and Christian Education,” Fr. James B. King, C.S.C., Moreau FYE Week 12).


Note: I made mention of past suicidal and violent thoughts and desires in this integration. I want to reassure you that those are all firmly in the past. I’ve not had anything like them in over a year.