What does community mean to you?

Caitlin | Te Whanganui-a-Tara

Caitlin shares how her first year in Wellington brought struggles with identity and mental health, but that building a chosen family taught her to embrace her authentic self.

“I remember moving here and one of my goals was to find people, and that’s what I feel like I’ve achieved. And I’m really proud of that. I met her [Ruby] when I came to Wellington. At the time, I didn’t know that I was queer at all. And so when I met her, I really admired her ability to just put herself out there and just be who she was. And that’s something that I’ve taken from her as well.

But the first year of university was easily the hardest year of my life, and that was a bit of a whirlwind, coming to a new city. I knew I had that support, and meeting Ruby was the best thing that ever happened to me, in retrospect. But at the time, I remember someone saying to me “it’s okay.” It’s like a car crash, you think that those things won’t happen to you, but it does and for me, that was like being queer. And obviously a car crash isn’t a great analogy because it’s not a bad thing, but that’s what it felt like at the time.

And so I was trying to talk to my parents about this. Obviously they, at least to my knowledge, have never been through something like that. So, that was a big moment for us in our relationship as well. And then I had some pretty severe mental health problems in that first year and I ended up going home for a bit. And my partner and my family all stuck by me for that. And I was able to come back and be brave. Or maybe try and look brave and strong through that support.

It looked like a lot of kindness towards myself, which I’d never tried before. It looked like a lot of hard work and a lot of support from both professionals and my family and my loved ones. It looked like having conversations and talking about things that I didn’t want to talk about before and acknowledging parts of myself that I think in high school especially, I just pushed down. I think that coming to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, as hard as that year was, those things all came up because that’s who I was and that’s okay. This year I’ve been doing really well and I’m really happy.

From my mum, I really learnt that to care about things is okay. It’s not uncool to care. It’s not uncool to try hard. And she would talk to me a lot about feeling like that in her youth. And I definitely felt like that in high school. I did not feel happy, I don’t think, particularly in high school. And from watching my mum succeed in her interests and passions I’ve learnt that that’s cool. And my dad is just so loyal, and he puts other people first and he’s a hard worker, that’s what he holds dearest to his values. So I think through that combination, I’ve really developed a sense of my identity.”