It Gets Better

I watched one of the It Gets Better videos not long after it started, after a kid in New Jersey jumped off a bridge. The story was everywhere—he’d been outed online, humiliated, and he saw no way through it. So other gay people, older ones, started filming themselves. Just sitting there saying: I made it out. This part is survivable. It gets better.

The videos became a thing fast. Athletes, celebrities, regular adults—all of them offering the same basic fact: we lived through this, and now we’re here. Not happy all the time, not magically fixed, just alive and on the other side of that particular hell.

What hits when you watch them is how unsentimental they are. No inspirational music, no carefully shot moments. Just someone in front of a phone camera saying: you think this is forever, but it’s not. You think you can’t survive this, but you can. I did.

I think people need to hear that more than we admit. There’s a moment in your life—maybe longer than a moment, maybe years—where you feel completely certain that things will never change, that this trapped feeling is permanent. That you don’t have a future. When you’re in it, you can’t believe other people made it out. But they did. And they’re willing to say so, on camera, to kids they don’t know.

The project was specifically about gay teens, and it was a direct response to a specific crisis. But the thing that made it work—that any of it works—is simpler than that. Other people have survived the thing you think will kill you. Not just survived: lived past it, built actual lives, became people you’d want to be. That evidence matters.

The videos are still there, accumulating. I imagine someone new every day is watching one, thinking okay, maybe this really does get better.