Mr. Damiani’s Odyssey If there’s one overarching lesson that I’ve learned in my own life, it’s that to achieve any kind of growth or insight we are required to take a journey into the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable, and that it’s often at the darkest and most challenging places that we are changed and are made to take on heroic qualities. We often don’t choose these journeys. They arrive to us unexpected and uninvited, sometimes catastrophically. Some people are forced to endure more than others, but no one escapes it entirely. To be a human being in the world requires heroic feats of endurance and hope. Like Odysseus, this journey is not straightforward. People tend to look at life as if it were a straight line going from one event to the next event to the next. In reality, for me anyway, it is more of a wandering here and there, slowly reaching a destination that…show more content… As a gay teenager, especially as a gay teenager growing up in a church that didn’t necessarily support gay people, I sometimes felt like Telemakhos being hunted by the suitors. I felt like I didn’t have allies and I felt unwelcome in my home. School was also a difficult place. Kids made jokes about gay people. Even though I was not out in high school and so the jokes were not directed at me, they still hurt. When Odysseus went to the underworld, he had to face very difficult parts of his past. He had to face the death of his own mother and he had to learn his own fate. The journey was as much inside of him as it was outside, in the physical world. Even so, the journey of coming out for me was a journey inward, learning to face uncomfortable parts of myself, the parts of myself that at times I would have preferred not to exist. Eventually, though, like Odysseus made peace with his comrades from Troy, I had to make peace with my own sexual orientation, and in so doing I gained more peace and confidence in
