Author Archive
I’m bad at coming out
by philippe leroyer via flickr
So, here’s the thing: I’m terrible at coming out. Seriously. I think that everyone who has ever come out can agree that it isn’t a one time thing. It’s something that you do over and over and over again with varying levels of fear and trepidation or excitement or whatever. I won’t claim to know what everyone’s emotions are about the subject; I’m barely okay with admitting to my own.
Anyway, I’ve been out since my first year of college. Not that ever I actually came out. Like I said, I’m really bad at coming out. It isn’t that I stumble over my words or have a panic attack or anything like that. I just… don’t bother to say anything, pretty much ever. It’s never really seemed like it was anyone else’s business. ‘Coming out’ in college meant hanging out with the other lesbians and then just letting people assume. At a small women’s college it was a pretty effective strategy. Everyone knew who I was and everyone knew who I spent time with, and if I happened to get defined by association, well, that was perfectly okay with me. The less I had to talk to people about myself, the happier I was. I’m not good at sharing and as a strategy, it worked out pretty well.
And then I went home for that first summer and I was surrounded by people who didn’t know, who didn’t have that shared context, and who I couldn’t rely on just leaving me alone. These people, they were my parents. And I would have been perfectly happy if I had never had to tell them, because my parents and I, we don’t really talk about things. They told me that my mother had breast cancer the day before she was admitted to the hospital. I got maybe 5 days notice before my father had bypass surgery, though that’s probably being generous. These are just extreme examples, but they illustrate a pattern. We don’t talk about things. So clearly I was due far more than nine months of keeping my secret. Which wasn’t really a secret. It was just something that I didn’t talk about. Karma, or whatever, owed me way more than 9 months.
