So. I’m twenty, I’m a junior. I work on an organic farm, I keep bees in Duke Gardens, and I study Spanish and history. Also, as of recently, I’m openly gay.
I started telling my friends last summer and finally told my family over Spring Break–which I guess makes me a late bloomer compared to most of the writers on this blog. Thus, to tell the truth, even though I’ve been excited for a while about the idea of contributing here, I’ve been unsure as to what topic I’d know enough about to discuss in any sort of an interesting or meaningful way. But now that I’m finally sitting down to throw my thoughts into a Microsoft Word document, I feel like I might be able to maintain some degree of coherence as I address the wonderfully frustrating issue of coming out.
So far, for me, the process has been a complicated one. By the time I went back to my house to “do it” a few weeks ago, things had been rough there for the better part of a year–in some respects, since the middle of high school. I was raised by a single mother and she and I in particular have for a long time found plenty of issues to disagree on, our arguments reaching a climax this past summer. I had taken a job—my current one–in North Carolina. When I went home for the weekend of the 4th of July, an aspect of the work I was doing triggered a fight whose causes had been accumulating for years, and I returned to the farm unsure of when I would talk with anyone in my house again.
Eventually, of course, things got better since I went back and told everyone I’m gay.
But while my relationship with my family remained uncertain, I had new experiences, I made new, liberal friends, and most importantly, I learned about self-reliance. In the past nine months I’ve found myself in enough bizarre situations that, had I not discovered how to find my center and keep my nerves under control, I probably would have lost my sanity. Or in certain cases killed someone. Like the time the air-brakes failed in the dump truck I was driving and I swerved off the road to avoid running into the pickup stopped in front of me.
I admit that doesn’t have much to do in and of itself with being gay. But the connection is that, despite the opportunities I’ve had for introspection and the relatively high amount of crazy circumstances that I feel I’ve been able to weather with rationality, I’m humbled to find that in certain situations, I still can’t help my anxiety. Attempting to fit in at LGBT social events has made that embarrassingly clear to me.
So I just dislocated my shoulder using a hoe—no big deal, it’s happened before. But holy shit, there’re other gay people over there!
That was definitely an exaggeration. But seriously, going to Fab Friday is still kind of awkward.
Anyway, I suppose that in general my feelings show that that I’m still not fully comfortable with myself, but viewed from a less self-centered perspective, I feel that they also reveal a more general truth, which is probably the core of what I’m attempting to write about today: that coming out is, without a doubt, a very long-term process. I used to have the naïve idea that as soon as I told my loved ones and checked off “Men” after “Interested In” on Facebook, the problems associated with the closet would disappear—accordingly, this semester I was super excited about Spring Break because, after months away from home, I aimed to become finally and unequivocally “out.” Despite accomplishing my goals for the week, however, I’ve found that the issues I sought to eliminate are just beginning to ease up. Here at Duke especially, I have a new set of questions to ask myself, besides just “Am I gay?” and “Who do I want to tell?”
Like, do I want to change how I dress? How I carry myself? Do I want new friends? Is it worth trying to adopt new interests to make them?
Do I want a romantic relationship? How do I pursue it?
In recent weeks I’ve had my first dating experiences, I’ve tried to enjoy myself at social events, and I’ve had no qualms about revealing my sexuality to anyone; but instead of feeling more centered, my experiences have left me, more than anything else, aware of the truth that I am still—to express it in one densely meaningful adjective—awkward. All of the time for introspection that the last year has afforded me certainly hasn’t improved my poise. If now I know better who I am as an individual, the challenge still remains to discover where I fit into a community.
So while I work on that issue, I simply need to accept that there’s going to be more discomfort ahead, as I deal with the awkwardness of finding a niche and the frustration of continuing to over-analyze insignificant details of social interactions (I’m not even going to try to deny that I do that). In the mean time, though, I hope this blog will be a good vent for my thoughts—or at the least, a place to share some amusing observations. In the coming months I intend to post here on whatever LGBT issues I happen to gain perspective into—and I promise that not all my entries will be as focused on myself as this one has been 😛
In any case, here’s to the hope that something comes out of it.
(No pun intended).
our lives. 