Coming Out

Today is National Coming Out Day. This year's theme is "Talk About It." So in celebration I decided that I would share my coming out story. I know I touched on it some back in when I was talking about looking for my Prince Charming, but I feel I didn't do it much justice. I was a sophmore in college, almost 12 years ago now, and I had just started working as a Peer Writing Consultant. We were required to keep journals of kind in order to help focus our writing, and I had come upon two enteries from a previous consultant who had worked in the writing center a few years before. I had always, I guess, known that I was different. I had girlfriends in high school, but in the end they just ended up being girls who were friends, I never really felt attracted to them. In college, my attraction toward men became more in focus, and then I found myself reading V's own coming out story. Sitting there on the couch, suddenly all the feelings that I had kept bottled up started coming to the surface. I was seeing myself through the eyes of another, another person who felt the same things I was feeling and had gone through the same emotions. I admitted then, for the first time, I was gay. I broke down, crying on the couch, while everything washed over me. I don't remember much more about that day, but I remember that in the next couple of weeks I started coming out to friends at school. The funny thing, most of them already knew, they were just waiting for me to "know." Well 12 years later, it is still a struggle. Some people are freed upon coming out, I was freed, yet still burdened. I live openly, but often feel that I have been discriminated against because of it. People would never admit it out loud, but I know it's there. And that is why coming out is so important. The more people the come out, the more society sees that we are human, we are just like them in many ways, we just love differently. That love is not wrong, but should be cherished as all love is cherished. Sometimes it's difficult, but in the end, change is always for the better, even if we don't see it at the time. If you only come out to one person, in the end, coming out to the one person, makes the burden easier, and coming out as a whole so much easier to bear.