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ghostinthecastle-blog · 6 years ago

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... a few months later

I still don’t know where I’m at in this process.

So a few weeks after my best friend came out and me coming out to my sister the same week, I was DJing for a good friend’s wedding. His brother is one year younger than me but we’ve all been good friends for 18yrs now. I got SUPER wasted at the wedding. Open bar... lost of loaded coronas... whoo boy.

So anyways the grooms brother and his wife, we were all just dancing around and talking and they kinda asked if i was even looking for anything soon... i said no, that i needed to work through some things first, to which my friend replied “what are you gay?” and i instantly came back and said “yes.” But with the most serious face and the emotion of it got to me, i can tell i surprised them but they were freaking awesome about it. but that felt really good. They’re the first of our group of friends to know.And really its the first verbal affirmation that i’ve done.

the rest of the night was filled with drunken shit, and i legit had one of the best times in a long ass time... i was drunk texting my best friend and i think he was drunk too, but the way the conversation headed it basically came to the point where i thought we were trying to say the same thing to each other but couldn’t... so i took the leap and admitted how i felt about him. that was and might have been the hardest thing i’ve done... i think it was harder than how my coming out is going to be. unfortunately that wasn’t mutual... i misread the signals. needless to say i was embarrassed and now i feel like there’s this fucking elephant in the room when we talk. ive tried to be normal about it and i have been as much as possible but damn if it isn’t hard.

so then a few weeks after that, a friend of mine that lives a couple hours away, who has been openly gay for a while, messaged me out of the blue one night, asking if he could ask me, “Will”, a question.... i go by Will on the apps... no one i know really calls me Will so i pretty much assumed he had seen me on an app.... turns out he started dating a guy i met on an app and noticed we were following each other on instagram. So that turned into that... and that was honestly a nice, funny and refreshing talk. I apparently have a fairy god father now. :LOLOL.

beyond that i’ve been doing some thinking... the kind of thinking i need a damn shrink for, or a friend to talk it out, and my best friend is hard to engage in that kind of discussion. so im left to my own thoughts for now... but anyways ive been doing some thinking, watching Love, Simon way too fucking much...

I almost wish I could get outed like he was... because then i could actually focus my anger at someone or something... I’ve realized that among the other emotions surrounding this, there’s a lot of anger.... and I am not an angry person and i even get angry at myself for being angry.

anger at society because we are put in this situation in the first place.

anger at the fear of change

anger at myself for being too scared

anger for not figuring this shit out when i was younger.

anger at wasting so much damn time trying to be someone who i wasnt that who knows what i missed out on.

Here i am now in my thirties... i should have had this figured out in my twenties a little more and enjoying that time... now i feel like I’m in a race against the clock. i guess thats just more of societies expectations but whatever.

I just need to be angry at someone or something and I cant be....and that’s partially even more infuriating.

i hope... i’m sure... i will get there one day. in the meantime im just ready to get off the rollercoaster.

#gay #gay man #coming out #feel

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ghostinthecastle-blog · 7 years ago

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Coming out is a thing I guess

This is primarily so I can get some thoughts down about recent life happenings... realizations, breakthroughs, struggles... you know, soft emotional crap that I’m not good at dealing with, but that’s for another time.

This is mostly my latest and biggest life altering moment. Sorry, it gets long.

I am gay... or bi, but with like a 75% leaning to men... but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just call it gay.

I’m 31 now but I didn’t start facing this reality until I was about 23 however if I look at my past I would have to identify the “start” of this at around 13 or 14. I realize now that I had a crush on my best friend. I confused jealousy and love for friendship and I did for a long time. I knew at the time that I had an “unusual” attraction to guys but I thought it was just a phase that I would work out or grow out. I wanted a so-called “normal” life and I thought I could still have it if I tried. So as we progress through middle and high school my friendship was only just that, a friendship, but one of jealousy whenever one of our other friends would get in the way. It didn’t help that we grew up in a small, redneck, close-minded town, the kind of place with lifted trucks, confederate flags and in 2018 a MAGA stronghold.

But I was so closeted and in denial that even moving to Seattle, aka Capitol Gay, wouldn’t let me move forward. I moved to Seattle for Culinary School and for anyone that’s worked in the restaurant industry, especially back of the house, knows the kitchen is a macho, chauvinistic and hyper-sexual environment, the kind that homosexuals would really just get torn apart in. Lesbians were okay, again because of chauvinism and hyper-sexuality. Plus my personal life was taking me on some adventures that I had to keep up appearances.

It was during this time, after college, but while still going on these “adventures” that I met a girl who was interested in me and I became interested as well. We started dating, long distance. It was easy that way for me because I didn’t have to fake my physical affection for her nearly as much. But it also allowed me to keep up the fantasy that one day I could have a normal life with a wife and kids.

We dated for several years but eventually split due to the distance and that neither of us were in a place in our lives to move to one another. Also that emotional crap i mentioned that I’m terrible at. Don’t get me wrong, I cared for her, and even after we broke up, i still cared so much that it pained me when I saw her with someone else. But the physical attraction wasn’t there on my half, and so it’s no surprise that we never took it very far physically.

Moving past that, I felt more freedom to start exploring my suppressed attractions. I downloaded the gay apps and started talking to guys. I met up with a guy that I am pretty sure was a FTM and just fooled around very quickly. It kind of shell-shocked me so I kinda just became a ghost on the apps, watching, talking and even ghosting some people. I hate that I did that but I was still so much in denial I couldn't face myself let alone them. But I did eventually meet up with a few guys over time and realized that hey, i like this. I really like this. And there’s a fucking gay sub-culture of people out there who like me for the way I am (bear/chub/cub). Like... holy fuck this is awesome. My self esteem was on a roller coaster. On one hand, I’m dealing with this whole being gay thing, but on the other, there’s men out there who love me! But I just kept meeting in secret but It was killing me that none of my friends or family knew.

By this time I’m about 27. I was still living in Seattle but my best friend had moved to Seattle then back home before finally going down to San Diego. That move gutted me a bit. I started to realize after my ex and I broke up and he moved away that what I was actually feeling was more than just friendship. I looked forward to the times he came home more than anything. Even if I only got to see him for an hour at the airport. I would volunteer to drive him to or from the airport just to spend time with him. He also would spend a combined year in Mexico and that time was rough because communication was rough and the jealousy hit again when he was hanging out with a guy down there whom he had labeled as a brother. The distance pained me but the more we talked, the worse the pain was, so i started to distance myself as a way to insulate myself from inevitable pain; to try and get over him by minimizing the contact we had. He was my best friend but I realized that’s all it would ever be and so I had better start dealing with that now.

Now it was during one of these sporadic conversations that we were talking about a recent camping trip we were on with his family. His cousins had gotten to calling me Cameron from “Modern Family”. I didn’t take offense and just laughed. Well while we were talking about that I dropped to him that I may have been more like Cam and Mitch than his cousins had first thought. I was so terrified by the text that I sent... i wrote it and i think i debated to send it for over an hour. i finally hit send, and then promptly didn’t look at my phone for almost 24hrs. I knew he would be okay and supportive but I had just made the biggest single revelation of my life and was afraid that by acknowledging his responses i would finally have to admit it to myself. He responded several times over the next day while i refused to look at my phone and sure enough, totally supportive and just reaffirmed why he was my best friend... and why i loved him. I did begin to sense a slight change though in our friendship. Not cold but just seemed more distant, so i started to increase the distance even more, again to avoid that heartbreak. He was the first person I came out to. It was mildly liberating but It was stil surrounded by so much fear and anxiety it didn’t do much for me.

By this time I also suspect that my roommates may have accidentally discovered my secret when they may have opened a box under my bed that had... *ahem* incriminating evidence *ahem*.... (they weren’t being nosy. we were moving and they were helping me to tear apart my Ikea bed frame before the weekend we had to pack up the u-haul) I wasn’t upset but I was secretly terrified... but if they did they never mentioned it and nothing ever changed.

One of those roommates was anothe rone of my best friends that I had only known for a few years but with whom I had quickly connected with. He wound up being the fill in for my previously mentioned best friend when it came to emotional stuff and deep conversations.. (I suppose at this time I should label these folks to avoid future confusion... so original best friend is “Harry” and new best friend is “Michael”).... So Michael wound up calling me while I was on lunch one day (i am no longer cooking at this point and had started a new career a couple years before) and he explained how he had this dream last night where long story short I was gay. It was an amusing dream and I laughed and we hung up so I could get back to work. But before I did, I wrote a bit of a message to him explaining that his dream wasn’t that far off from the truth. He replied back his support but to this day I think he may have thought I was joking, partly because of what happened about a year later....

One of my best friends was getting married and one of the invitees was my ex as she had become friends with my group of friends when we had dated before. I was excited to see her again, and asked her to be my official-unofficial date at the wedding. She was actually at another one of my best friend’s wedding the year before and I could tell at that time that she was interested again but I didn’t act on it. But back to the second wedding... Well many drinks later, a lot of laughs and fun, we danced and then walked outside to talk. We wound up making out (and had audience as all my friends cheered) and basically re-kindled the relationship. We didn't officially-unofficially start dating until about 6mos later, but I was happy because again, maybe I could suppress this damn gay, or at best, come out to her as Bi and live with that. But at the same time, it was long distance again and that made it easy for me to not have to force my physical affection for her. I still cared for her and loved her... but it became clear that I was not sexually attracted, something which I told myself isn’t that big of a deal. Well come to find out a healthy sexual relationship is important in any romantic relationship. (No shit) Im also just not that good at physical affection,.. also for another time....

But in the end, after trying to make it work and apparently she was just too unhappy to continue so she called it off. I was fine while we talked on the phone and agreed, but the weeks after and even just until a few weeks ago, It kept stinging as I thought we had been doing pretty good. But even she had hit it on the head when we went to Canada for New Years by claiming she had thought I might have been gay due to my lack of physical affection. I also have to admit that while we were dating i still had the gay apps to appease that part of my attraction. I am not proud of this, but living two lives is not the easiest thing to do and when I allowed myself to accept that burden, I really didn’t realize what it would entail. I had started to think about how to tell her that I was Bi because if we were going to be successful, that is an important thing to be upfront about.

So a hard lesson learned but I finally had to admit to myself that I like guys more and I’m probably going to be happiest with that decision. This was 4mos ago... So then starts the self-acceptance. Not an easy thing... lots of long nights of thinking. The movie Love, Simon had just come out (pun not intended) and i bought it and watched it. While I don’t identify necessarily with the circumstances or Simon himself even, the same reservations he had (other than being blackmailed) and the words from his family and friends really fucking stuck with me.

Simon didn’t want anything to change between him and his best friend so it was easier to just keep things the way they were. I have avoided telling damn near everyone because of this... I don’t want anything to change. I love my friends and our dynamic. But I also know that they don’t care and nothing would change. I wasn’t entirely sure of this until recently due to one of my best friends’ brothers coming out as Trans and even the most religious person in my group of friends was totally nonchalant about it.

Then Simon’s mom tells him what I think all people going through this process need to hear... “you are still you.. You get to exhale now... You get to be more you than you’ve been in a very long time. you deserve everything you want.”

I may not have cried ugly tears at that but fuck if I didn’t connect right there... and realize that i deserve the same fucking thing. I haven’t been my truest self in god knows how long. I also remember watching someone on youtube several years back come out and talking about living life authentically. Living a true, authentic life, and that has also resonated with me for quite a while...

So ever since most of my nights have been late ones... just looking things up... watching other people’s coming out stories on youtube and just mentally and emotionally dealing with this. I also have moved back to that small redneck town as of 1.5yrs ago and the fact that there is no culture or scene here doesn’t help. But I’ve been formulating ideas on when and how and where I’m going to tell my friends and family. I convinced my sister to come up here while she was in town mostly for the soul purpose of telling her as the first in the family. It never happened as I could never utter the words. For some reason those two words are the hardest, most impossible fucking words to say out loud. So she left and there went that chance.

A month later one of my old good friends is getting married and Harry flies up to be the best man. He invites us out to dinner a few nights after he arrives. He had apparently told our friend there was a purpose to the dinner and come to find out, Harry wanted to use the dinner as a chance to come out to us...

.......

I’m stunned. It was so damn surreal it felt unreal. Here is my best friend of 18yrs coming out... and while many had suspected and even I had my doubts, I never pushed it and always defended him because best friend. And yet, I’m not immediately hopeful of something happening... but my mind is racing because i finally have someone who I can fucking talk to about this... someone in the same stage of life and coming out.... and even now, almost a month later it’s still just... “hey, i have someone i can talk to about this and go through this with and not hide our true selves from anymore”. I did talk to him privately the night before he left and we eventually got on topic and I had to reaffirm to him my gayness (lol), which he got confused by when my ex and I got back together... I almost feel guilty because I wonder if I hadn’t done that he may have decided to come out to me earlier. But here we were, two 31 year olds just trying to get through this stage and find ourselves...

While I was literally sitting there talking to him, i was messaging my sister about San Diego since she is living there for the time being and i was comparing where Harry lived versus her. She mentioned she lives in the more gay neighborhood and what she said just gave the perfect segue and I came out to her. That was so much easier than the previous times... maybe because my conversation with Harry had eased my anxiety and i was in a good mood. All i know she was pissed i told her over facebook messenger. :)

I still have lots of people to tell... not because i need to draw attention to it... but to be like “hey... this is me.... this is who i’ve been in secret, here i am in the light” and i’m going to be working that process. I am fortunate in knowing that I don’t expect any of my friends or family to have issue. Anyone who matters to me I know will be okay, but for some reason that still doesn’t make it as easy as it should be. I’ve got more layers to unfold that I plan on using this platform for but I think this is enough for one night.

So here I am at 31 truly starting this process... wishing I had done it so long ago... cause at 31 just starting to truly deal with this fucking sucks. It’s almost like having to move back in with your parents. But I need my chance to exhale... it’s time to be me, to live my life authentically.

#ThankYouSimon

#gay #gay love #coming out #life #my life #love simon

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