I can’t believe I have had this journal (uh, journal-type log) since 2006. 2006 is where my life took an unfortunate turn. I got depressed. I don’t know how to describe it—I stopped existing outside of social interations. I would go home and plug myself into my computer. I slept and ate erratically. I drank too much at parties and made an ass of myself. I slipped out of touch with a basic part of myself and forgot that it existed. Basically, I stopped taking account of my life. I withdrew, became embarrassed, stopped going to class. My memories of this time are few and hazy, like I can’t quite remember whole classes and what semester exactly it was that I dropped out. I know I felt anxious and guilty almost constantly. I know how scary it must have seemed from the outside when I stopped interacting with friends, dropped out of school and moved home mid-semester without so much as a goodbye, and only occasionally answering calls and hanging out with friends over the next four years. It pains me that I lost four years to a foggy depression that had me so deeply blanketed by bad feelings to avoid that I didn’t even know I was depressed.
I cried at times. Maybe a two-day or two-week jag once or twice a year. My family and what few friends I had urged me to get help. I was despondent, in denial. But I didn’t sit sad in my room; I didn’t cut myself or think of suicide. I was numb, numb as though I had medicated myself with drugs, but I hadn’t. My mind was able to provide the sweet foggy release of denial. I gained weight, stopped brushing my hair, was reprimanded at my job for not dressing appropriately. My room was a mess of moldy dishes. I kept friends away.
There were okay periods. I dated a close friend in my first same-sex relationship, something that seemed fun and light at the time. I wasn’t bothered by this new aspect of my sexuality at the time, or at least not that it occurred to me. I was happier and more comfortable than I knew I could be with another person. I knew that it was normal to have a same-sex crush (thank you, current and recent generations!) and only later did the anxiety start to build that this might be me. That I might be a closeted lesbian, closeted even to myself, as I was starting to comprehend how deluded and numb to the world I had been in the past. My attraction to women started to scare me.
I still beat myself up for leaving college, for not going back, for throwing away the options my counselor gave me to save my scholarship. People don’t respect me, and I don’t respect myself, and that’s where I am trying to rebuild how I feel. I know that I have to look at what pains me: what don’t I like about myself. What can I change, and what can’t I change. Why do people not like me, and is it changeable? Not always.
Only by confronting truths that scare me do I achieve growth, and only in the pain that self-awareness can bring do I feel a small weight come off my shoulders.
I never made a conscious decision to delude myself about things, but somewhere along the line I started doing this. I started to shy away from the uncomfortable truths. Everybody in our family is depressed, or most of us, and that hurts. Thoughts like these make me unbearably sad, but only by allowing myself to think about these things do I let myself move forward.
I eventually got back in touch with my old friends, started hanging out again, and several of us moved in together. I hadn’t kept in touch, and it never came up, that I’d had a lesbian relationship. This started to bother me, and I started to experience that anxiety over my sexuality.
I said that my mind kept me drugged. I’m always trying to figure out the cause of my brain fog, but that’s not the only thing that allowed me to avoid painful and obvious truths in my life. My mind was always busy, with a book or the internet or the tv, or my phone, or making a list or cataloging life changes I needed to make.
When I smoked, I was prone to anxious self-criticisms. I became hyper-aware of how I came across to people, how I dressed, how I looked. I was able to see that I’m less attractive than I liked to imagine (an illusion that I would keep up by never looking in the mirror, not even to brush my thinning hair). But smoking also stripped away something that, once removed, allowed me to see just how unhappy and pathetic I was. What an afraid, ineffectual person I was. I was a coward.
Still, once I was sober, I would slip back into the mind-numbing drone of my waking mind.
Smoking a lot forced me to face the truth. I’m attracted to women. Men, sometimes, too. I was elated to find online that there were plenty of bisexual people that weren’t “closeted” or “confused.” I reacquainted myself with the Kinsey scale. I felt better. Then I started to really look at myself. Why was I so relieved not to be grouped in with homosexual people? As uncomfortable as I, a staunch gay-marriage supporter, was to realize the truth, I had to admit to myself that I had been harboring some homophobic thoughts. As someone attracted to both sexes, I was okay being grouped with straight people, but not gay. The insecurity of my position struck me in the face. I pitied such a person, someone threatened enough about herself to not admit the truth. The truth was that I was worried that I wasn’t pretty or feminine enough, and people would say “of course!” and group me in with a negative stereotype.
I find these thoughts shameful, but it also makes me happy to have recognized them in myself—to realize that I felt somehow threatened or lessened by my attraction to women. Happy seems like a weird word, but I’ll tell you why I use it. It’s because I’ve lived with those unhappy feelings about myself for four years or so, and I know that if I hadn’t had the strength to see the truth about myself for what it is, I could have lived my whole life folded in on myself, crippled by fear.
I can be so fraid. I feel governed by my fear. I feel that I am a coward sometimes, and that is why I have to seek fear out where it hides and confront it. Which is what I did with the bisexual thing.
I feel like I don’t owe anyone but myself the truth. Why demand on truth being a virtue while denying it to the most important person in my life? I knew I was not talking about my lesbian relationship because I was more comfortable this way. I didn’t have any delusions about the fact that I was being kind of sketchy on that count. But once I saw why I acted the way that I acted, I didn’t want anything to do with that way of thinking. It was this determination that made me tell my friends. I remember my late, great, gay aunt saying to me, “I don’t hate homophobes. I know what it’s like to be one.” And I wasn’t going to be one anymore.
And it was so easy. Even when my anxiety rolled away from my bisexuality and into the fact that I was one of “those” people, the closeted down-low thing—I remember very clearly the thought that I had a couple days before I told them. I remember thinking that my friends wouldn’t have a problem with the bi thing, but would probably be weirded out endlessly by the down-low thing. It’s the kind of thing that makes you lose a lot of respect for a person. Then I remember thinking clearly that I would never be able to respect myself if I kept it a secret.
IT WAS SO EASY AND REWARDING. I cannot stress that enough. Coming out to my friends was easy because—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I felt good about myself and my realizations and my decision. I liked myself at that moment in time, and it became so tiny in comparison what other people cared about me, even my close friends. I had some booze under my belt but I wasn’t drunk, I was talking lucidly and with a clear mind. I told three people. Two were a little rattled, but that’s totally normal. One said she’d thought she might like girls once in high school. One said that she was “just attracted to faces.”
It was so, so, so worth it. I’ve talked about it some more with my roommate since, and I told my sister (who told me that girls taste better, and made me laugh). Seriously, if anybody is considering coming out, it’s awesome. Especially if it makes you love yourself so much that the thought of everybody knowing doesn’t make you care at all.
I’m not there. I still worry what people think about me, and often. But I’ve tasted what life is like when you love yourself, and I’ve got work to do, but I’m on my way.
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