Had pie last night with a group of guys, to offer support to a guy who is just barely coming to terms with his orientation/sexuality/whatever term he'd prefer.
Sitting there, i remembered all the water under the bridge since i did the same thing. I know it's a common experience, the first time you met other dudes who like dudes. I sat there thinking, why does this guy have to go through this. I assumed he'll have similar dark nights and hard choices. That his life isn't what he thought it would be growing up. I really wanted to tell him to run back into the closet. Live the closeted life.
Cause being gay is hard. regardless of what you choose to do with it.
But that's the thing isn't it. Running in back to ignoring my sexuality won't help people. I'm not talking about being public here, but i'm talking about admitting to myself I have an attraction to men.
It can't be done. As much as i would like to go back to the innocence of when i was a kid, before i realized this thing--sometimes i'm happy with it, sometimes i curse God for it-- was part of my life, I can't.
What i really was sad about was the loss of innocence. The loss of the simple life. It's a common part of growing up.
The Garden of Eden was super fun. Lots of animals with bellies to rub, lots of trees with fruit that would make hecka sweet smoothies, and like plants, and also, no clothes. Seriously, they gotta just run around nekkid. But when innocence is lost, you can't go back. And really that's not the point. you enter a world that's lonely and dreary, kinda sucks. and people start to insist you confine yourself with clothing. But it's where you learn stuff, it's where you figure stuff out.
So, yeah. Going back. doesn't happen. Leaving the closet, at least for myself has been good. I can't ascribe the crap of my life to the fact that i'm open about my sexuality. I had crap when i was in the closet too. Crap comes, but so does good stuff. Too make an awkward ineffective example, you can't get fresh milk if you stay under your blanket, you gotta go squeeze those cow teats yourself.
Life gets complicated but it's gotta, and ....it gets better.
Sitting there, i remembered all the water under the bridge since i did the same thing. I know it's a common experience, the first time you met other dudes who like dudes. I sat there thinking, why does this guy have to go through this. I assumed he'll have similar dark nights and hard choices. That his life isn't what he thought it would be growing up. I really wanted to tell him to run back into the closet. Live the closeted life.
Cause being gay is hard. regardless of what you choose to do with it.
But that's the thing isn't it. Running in back to ignoring my sexuality won't help people. I'm not talking about being public here, but i'm talking about admitting to myself I have an attraction to men.
It can't be done. As much as i would like to go back to the innocence of when i was a kid, before i realized this thing--sometimes i'm happy with it, sometimes i curse God for it-- was part of my life, I can't.
What i really was sad about was the loss of innocence. The loss of the simple life. It's a common part of growing up.
The Garden of Eden was super fun. Lots of animals with bellies to rub, lots of trees with fruit that would make hecka sweet smoothies, and like plants, and also, no clothes. Seriously, they gotta just run around nekkid. But when innocence is lost, you can't go back. And really that's not the point. you enter a world that's lonely and dreary, kinda sucks. and people start to insist you confine yourself with clothing. But it's where you learn stuff, it's where you figure stuff out.
So, yeah. Going back. doesn't happen. Leaving the closet, at least for myself has been good. I can't ascribe the crap of my life to the fact that i'm open about my sexuality. I had crap when i was in the closet too. Crap comes, but so does good stuff. Too make an awkward ineffective example, you can't get fresh milk if you stay under your blanket, you gotta go squeeze those cow teats yourself.
Life gets complicated but it's gotta, and ....it gets better.
Yeah, it does get better. There is hope. It is a journey but the struggle I found is not so much about being gay but how I managed the stigma that came with being gay. Being gay is not difficult for me anymore. Being in the closet was always difficult for me. The way I see it now - what was difficult for me was how I was handling the stigma. Who I was never changed but how I dealt with the stigma changed very much over time as I went from fighting it to increasingly accepting it to coming out to interacting openly and honestly more and more and all that helped replace all the self-hatred and self-ignorance (a lot of which I was not aware of) slowly at first but then more quickly with self-acceptance and self-awareness. I used to think being gay was an emergency. Now I think being gay is no different than being heterosexual in all the ways that really matter. As I made progress, the inner conflict lessened and was replaced by an increasing sense of peace. Now I feel at peace and normal all the time. Here's another way of thinking about it - I experienced decades of negativity about my sexuality; it took me years to shed all that negativity and recover the positivity about my sexuality that had been absent from my life before.
ReplyDeleteRegards,
Philip