Taylor McLain

How Gay Pride Saved My Life

It was a Sunday. June 30, 2019 to be exact. I was working for an Amazon fulfillment center at the time and a few of my coworkers were persuading me to join them in the annual Pride Parade. I have two sisters that are still in high school and at the time they were 15 and 16. I thought it would be good for them to participate in something like that and experience a little culture. I signed us up. At the time, I had no idea how miserably lonely I truly was. I'm a cisgender heterosexual woman (26 then) and was dating a man whose name I'll leave out of this. We had been together for 3 years and 6 months. We spent almost 1 year living together at my parents house and another 2 years living alone. He deployed for 10 months during that time period, and I stayed with him. We adopted 2 cats. And I was 1 semester into my junior year of college. All of these numbers felt crucial to me at the time. They were measurements of a life I wanted so badly to work. I didn't want to accept how much time I had been wasting.