A few weeks ago, on a sunny, unseasonably warm afternoon in late October, I had a fun and exciting day with my family and friends at the Nevada Day parade in our state capital of Carson City. I’m a native born Renoite and the Nevada Day parade is one of the biggest events of the season. My mom was there, as well as my siblings, niece and nephews. I can remember growing up when Nevada Day fell on Halloween every year. It was a happy coincidence that our founding was on October 31, 1864 and it wasn’t until later in life that I learned most states don’t celebrate their founding annually. In 2000, we changed the state holiday to be observed on the last Friday of October, giving us a consistent 3-day weekend.

The parade is always a fun event. It brings out local businesses, charities, political organizations, and citizens of all kind. Northern Nevada being a little more conservative than the rest of the state, and decidedly more conservative than the Bay Area just over the Sierras, the parade attendees tend to lean more Republican than Democrat. Walking down the parade route there were some boos and thumbs down from folks in lawn chairs wearing Trump hats, but most of them gave me a smile or a peace sign if that’s what I showed them first.

I was walking with about 60 staff and volunteers for the Pete Buttigieg campaign. Most of the campaigns had people walking, some in large groups with elaborate floats, others just walked with the state Democratic party holding up rally signs for their favorite candidates. I was in a great mood because we had a particularly large group compared to most of the campaigns.

Just a month earlier, at the end of September, Pete and the rest of the Democratic candidates had appeared at the Iowa Steak Fry. It’s a campaign tradition where the candidates and their supporters descend upon Des Moines to grill steaks, plant signs, give speeches, cheer, and yes… dance.

The excitement around the campaign in Iowa was substantial. Pete had risen from a no-name mayor of a smallish Indiana town (much smaller even than my hometown of Reno) to be a real contender in this Democratic primary season. Staff and supporters there cheered the candidates as they took the stage, waved their signs, and several of the candidates and their staff marched and cheered and danced badly right alongside their supporters. One of the Iowa locals made up a dance for Pete’s walk-on song “High Hopes” and excited volunteers and staff performed it along the side of the road to hype up passersby. It was a simple, corny dance that anybody could be taught to do, requiring no more skill or swagger than the infamous Macarena.

I’d been following the campaign since the early spring, when I first read about a young gay mayor from the Midwest competing to be our next president. I listened to every podcast interview, I watched every news appearance, I listened to Pete read the audio version of his book “Shortest Way Home.” I was so excited at the prospect not only of having a candidate in the race who really seemed to represent me (for I am also a 30-something gay man with similar values) but one who was incredibly smart and seemed to continually listen and learn just as much as he spoke.

When he appeared on a CNN town hall I watched it twice in a row and felt the same kind of hopefulness and inspiration I hadn’t encountered in politics since I first heard Obama speak at the DNC National Convention in 2004. I had just spent the first few years of the Trump administration frustrated and angry, outraged at the scandals and corruption but unsure what 2020 would hold. Who would go up against him and what would their message be? What would the story of this political era be when we looked back at it?

Bullying

I always say that I wasn’t “really” bullied when I was a kid. When I think of bullying, my mind immediately conjures up images from movies and TV. Constant harassment, gangs of kids beating on a poor outcast, bikes or shoes or backpacks stolen. Being shoved in a locker. I went to school in the 1990s but now I associate modern bullying with cruel and hateful texts or tweets. I couldn’t have been bullied. There were kids that really did get beaten and harassed, and it just wouldn’t be right for me to claim that I was bullied too if I never received a real severe beating myself, right?

And as appalling the thought is that I would consider myself a victim, there was always one thing even worse, that I wouldn’t ever stoop to: playing a victim. We learn it from a young age: there is always somebody who has it worse off than you. There are children starving in Africa. At least you have your health. At least you have loving parents. I always knew, as long as I can remember, that it just wouldn’t be right for me to complain. I wasn’t really bullied, blood was never drawn. Anyways, I was smart enough to just keep my head down.

Everyone who knew me then would have described me as a shy nerd. I had glasses and wore braces. I didn’t play any sports. I spent most of my time reading, because before the era of cell phones it was the most effective way to get away from the real world. I don’t remember being called very many names. But there was one that stuck. I knew what I was. A loner. I can’t remember how many times I was called that, by how many kids, but I always knew that I was the one who wouldn’t be invited to birthday parties, and if I was it was just out of pity. They were the cool kids and I was a tagalong. I learned very early I didn’t belong with them.

The thing is: I’m not shy. In my current part time job as a trivia host at local bars, I get on a microphone and talk to crowds several nights as week. As I was working on the Buttigieg campaign this summer and fall, I got on stage before a rally and spoke to a crowd of 800 supporters about growing up in Reno and how they could get involved with the campaign. I didn’t even break a sweat. It was never about being shy. It was about being afraid. And I was afraid. Because as much as I trained myself to deny it, the bullying was real.

That fear, born from bullying, doesn’t go away easily. It may change it’s shape and it may be reflected back to the world, but it sticks with us and at the root is a sense that we do not belong with others, or that they don’t belong with us. I went on to high school, and made friends with a couple senior girls in my journalism class. But after a year they told me they were sick of me, that their project of treating me like a friend had ended. I had never skipped school before, but I walked home crying instead of to my next class.

I eventually moved away and went to college and came out, and desperately filled my life with as many acquaintances as possible in order to feel popular, to try to find that sense of belonging I’d felt lacking my whole life. Like too many others, my early years of college were defined by toxic relationships in a misguided search for acceptance.

But a broken sense of belonging isn’t just about socializing and friends. It spills into every aspect of our lives. I have gone from job to job, excelling often, but always sure that I’ll be discovered as an impostor before long. That something about me just doesn’t quite fit in the work world I’m trying to inhabit. I’ve spent most of my adult life just trying to figure out where exactly I do belong, because nothing seems quite right.

I wasn’t raised religious in any way, save for a few visits to Sunday school in my elementary school years. I think my parents just wanted to be able to say they’d exposed me and my siblings to religion. As I grew up and learned what religious people thought of gay people, it became clear that I certainly didn’t belong in their world anyway. When I was a sophomore or junior in high school, in the lead up to the election of 2000, candidate George W. Bush talked openly of his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as an appeal to the religious right. I had figured out I was gay by then but wasn’t out to anybody.

Over the years, like many gay people, I developed an active habit of disparaging people of faith. I was an avowed atheist who rolled his eyes at the very idea that people believe in some magic sky dude who listens to their wishes. I didn’t just consider religious people to have different views than me, I considered them to be just plain dumb, and myself just plain better than they were. And I didn’t hide it. I called them names online and surrounded myself with people who were happy and comfortable to hear me ridicule those who dared to express religious views. Of course, I kept most of my vitriol to the internet, safe from having to look anybody in the eye while I took pains to tear them down.

I spent most of my adulthood this way. I did well at work, but something was always wrong and I knew I should be doing something else. I married and had a long and mostly happy relationship, but he was the more “fun” one of our pair, and I would often find myself sitting among close friends, but just outside the circle, unsure of the right time and place to make myself a part of the conversation. Even with my partner of a decade and among our most familiar friends I often felt out of place. To this day, I still get pangs of insecurity and suspicions that even my best friends will reject me any moment.

It was around that time in the summer of 2015 that I discovered the Bernie Sanders campaign. As much as I’d been excited by Obama at the beginning of his first term in 2008, I quickly fell to disappointment at the lack of progress I’d hoped for. Over the years of Obama’s administration, I became more and more frustrated. Instead of an overhaul to our health care system I expected, we negotiated down to a system that felt more like a handout to private insurance companies than a real challenge to them. Instead of getting out of the wars that had defined the Bush era, we continued to be mired in conflict overseas.

Sanders was a new and exciting possibility. Obama would be leaving, but we had the chance to try again, this time with a candidate who wouldn’t compromise. A candidate who was so singularly devout in his convictions I had absolutely no doubt that he would take on all challengers and never compromise his vision. I spent the summer of 2015 sure that there was only one way for our country to move forward, and that was with Bernie. The primary got more and more contentious as the season went on. The story started to change, and the focus shifted.

By the Fall, when I finally deleted my Facebook account, I’d liked or shared hundreds of political articles. Except they weren’t about how much I liked Bernie anymore. They were all about Hillary Clinton. They were about how Hillary Clinton was an establishment hack who didn’t really care about progress. They were about how Clinton and the DNC were cheating Bernie. By this time I’d developed a real skill for putting other people down, and I did it as often as possible. Mostly, my thoughts turned to thinking about how Clinton supporters could be so dumb. Didn’t they know that she would never do anything good for them? What a bunch of idiots. How could they not know they were just being played?

This movement, this revolution, was for real progressives. Hillary Clinton and her supporters did not belong with us.

By the general election it was clear that all those perceived faults were minor when put up against Donald Trump. I voted for her and was crushed when she lost the general election, but I quickly went back to figuring out my own life as I lost faith once again in our political system to ever get anything right.

Belonging

In 2017, after ending my relationship and quitting my job, I moved back home to Reno and into a small apartment near the Truckee river and just a short walk from downtown. I hadn’t lived here in my hometown for the previous 16 years. My family was all here, but I had no friends to speak of. I had no job. But having grown in this same neighborhood, there was some comfort in the familiarity. I knew I wanted to find a job that involved working with the public. When I’d first visited Portland years earlier, before I lived there, I’d taken a walking tour and one day while on a jog with my sister told her that I wished there was a tour company in Reno I could apply to work for.

By pure luck, a local food tour company was indeed hiring, and I got myself a job that let me explore my own hometown. I’d also learned recently about a website called Couchsurfing that paired up travelers with hosts who had a spare bedroom or couch to crash on. I started hosting travelers, and spending much of my free time taking visitors up to Lake Tahoe to my favorite beach, or walking them around town on a free version of my normal tour, or to dinner at my mom’s house. I learned to welcome anybody, from anywhere, into my life even if just for a couple days. When the tour season ended, and I was faced with the decision of what to do next, I took a leap.

I wanted to see more of the country and meet more people before I finally put down roots in Reno, so in 2018 I embarked on a year-long road trip around the country. I didn’t have a map or detailed agenda, just a rough plan to visit as many National Parks as possible. I didn’t have the money to travel in #vanlife style, just some savings from a previous job that would be enough to scrape by if I budgeted carefully, and a Prius with enough room to lay down in the back for camping in parking lots and public lands. And of course, a Couchsurfing account to sometimes meet and stay with locals wherever I happened to be.

I never stayed anywhere more than a week. Almost everywhere that I traveled was completely new to me. I visited a handful of friends and family but the majority of the people I met were complete strangers who had little in common with me except for their willingness to take in a traveler for a night or two. There is no reason I should have felt at home or gained any sense of belonging along the way. I was thousands of miles from home, with the inside of my car as the only consistently familiar sight. But the sense of belonging came anyway.

I met more and more people from different parts of the country, with completely different lives and stories than my own, and talked to them about where they were from, what they had experienced. And I learned to welcome more and more strangers in as part of the story of my travels, the story of my year around the country, and the story of my life. I learned that belonging isn’t just about feeling like you belong at a job, or in a relationship, or among your friends. True belonging is understanding that you hold a valuable place in this country, in this society, and in this world. And it’s about looking for, and finding, that same value in every person we meet along the way.

When I got back to Reno after about 25,000 miles on the road, I found myself looking once again for work, for some structure in my life, for some income while I figured out my next steps. That’s when I learned about Pete.

Just a few years ago, I certainly would have shunned Pete. I would have had a never-ending list of insults for him. I was well practiced in shooting down what I viewed as boring milquetoast gays who performed a sad version of heteronormativity. I could see myself raining down tweets about how we just lost an election with a shallow moderate candidate who was too cowardly to embrace real revolutionary change. And above all things, he was religious!? Just what kind of pathetic, self-loathing gay man would set foot in a church after all the religious right had done to us?

But in those intervening years I’d learned what it means to welcome others. I’d learned what it means to accept people as they are and guide them to the right side of history. And one of the first things I learned about Pete Buttigieg was that he too understood fully what it means to seek belonging not just for ourselves, but for all people. In fact, “belonging” sits very near the top of the campaign’s Rules of the Road and has become a core focus of his campaign. Instead of acting on those old instincts of exclusion and criticism, learned from my bullies and doled out to my own victims, I instead read his policies, listened to his vision for this country, and found that it resonated strongly with my own newer and healthier beliefs.

In April, I drove 7 hours to Las Vegas and stayed with a Couchsurfing host for the night to see Pete in the morning at a coffee shop meet and greet. I told him to come visit us in Northern Nevada. I applied for a job the first day they were posted. And in July, I began work on the campaign.

High Hopes

On October 26, before the Nevada Day parade, I stood in the bed of the pickup truck I’d borrowed from my mom, and taught our group of volunteers and staff the High Hopes dance. We decorated the truck with blue and yellow streamers, practiced chants together, and some of us walked through the crowd to talk with local voters about the campaign. It was a truly fun day of laughing and cheering, celebrating the state most of us grew up in and know well, and the campaign we support.

I posted a video taken by a supporter on Twitter. In the video I’m standing in the bed of that truck, teaching the dance. It’s obvious to all how much fun I’m having. The joy of working for something you believe in is profound and undeniable.

It only took about a week for the onslaught of criticism and ridicule. A prominent supporter of another candidate shared the video and a wave of cynical responses followed. The video was viewed over a million times. Thousands upon thousands of complete strangers leapt at the opportunity to dehumanize and insult me in comments and messages. The video and dance went on to be mocked by major newspapers and late night comedy shows.

The narrative was crystal clear: This is corny and uncool.

The message directed at me was just as clear: You don’t belong.

These people who bullied me are very familiar. I was still following them on Twitter from days not long past, when I used to share their views and attitude. I likely would have been one of them, trying to heap shame upon a complete stranger I knew nothing about. And if I’d been a target in those days, I probably would have hated them right back.

But there is something different about this campaign, and something different about me now. I don’t hate them back. Before, being bullied had driven me to be a bully myself. Feeling like I didn’t belong led me to grasp at power by making others feel just as unwelcome as I often did. Now that I understand what belonging really means, and I’ve seen a campaign focused on it from the highest levels, all I can do is welcome more people into my life and into this important conversation we must all share. I’ve since left my job at the campaign in order to spend more time on the other parts of my life I value, but am so grateful for the opportunity to continue volunteering with a campaign that truly centers the need for all to be heard, valued and respected.

I’ll let others focus on outrage alone, or cynicism, or even hatred if they choose.

Instead, I’ll be over here where I belong. You’re always welcome.