the closet
12 Feb
I have not just been in the closet – I’ve been buried in the back of a long term storage facility with an elaborate Fort Knox-style security system. I was tucked so far in the back corner that you would have needed a map, compass and sophisticated GPS system to find me in there, hidden away, trying my hardest not to be noticed.
Even if you had stumbled across me and somehow recognized me for what I was, I’m not sure you could have gotten me out. For so long I have been crammed and locked inside a massive box, which was inside another massive box, which was inside another massive box (ad infinitum). Each of these boxes was chained, padlocked and booby trapped and covered in words scrawled in angry black marker…
…Denial…Good Girl…Conformity…Expectations…Insecurity…Fear…
Why?
What combinations of personality and life experiences led me to deny myself for so very long? What convoluted social regulations made it necessary for me to push down, block out, hide away from things I have been feeling and wanting for much of my life? What kind of lies did I have to tell myself to sustain my belief that I could feel and think all those things and still be a good little straight girl?
Why was I so damn afraid to be me?
I never gave voice to this in my life. Not to friends, not in the countless journals I filled with angst and joy and philosophies about the meaning of life and stories about kissing boys. Only in the quietest, darkest corners of my heart and in my wildest silent fantasies did I let this live. I never once spoke of this aloud until meeting my best friend M.(another married lesbian, we’re a more common breed than one might think).
And in having a place to release my feelings they became – for the first time – something real. It was such a relief, such a sweet exhale, to let go of these swirling, mixed up, crazy emotions that had been fighting for acknowledgement for so long. It wasn’t a quick path from there to here; it still took three full years of discussing and processing and agonizing to get to the point where I could accept my sexuality without reservation or denial or apology.
For the past seven months I have been ever so slowly making my way out of that closet and into the light. Every step forward is liberating, every time I am open and honest with the people in my life I feel a little bit lighter and a little more solid at the same time. Every time I am accepted for who I am, I feel myself occupying this new space with more confidence.
But as I move further and further into this new life I also find myself wishing I could have figured this out a little sooner, that I could have been this person a little earlier. I wonder what it would have been like to own my experience on this level when I was 16 or 21 or 28. I wonder what it would have been like to go through my early adulthood knowing and accepting and loving myself this way.
On many levels I get that this was my path. That everything I’ve lived through in the past 32 years was necessary to my journey. That everything I did was something I had to do to get here, to this point, so that I could live THIS exact life. But sometimes I just have to shake my head and laugh that it seemed so hard and took so long and scared me so much – because the reality is incredibly easy. It fits. There is a rightness to this life, a sense of immediate and total belonging, that I’ve never experienced before. This is who I am, without doubt or hesitation. This is me.
And I hope that most of you out there know on a personal level exactly how amazing that is, because there is nothing that compares, and no way I could ever fully explain how it feels.
It’s exciting and calming and electrifying and crazy and easy and it’s just simply good. Yeah. It’s good.
I have not just been in the closet – I’ve been buried in the back of a long term storage facility with an elaborate Fort Knox-style security system. I was tucked so far in the back corner that you would have needed a map, compass and sophisticated GPS system to find me in there, hidden away, trying my hardest not to be noticed.
Even if you had stumbled across me and somehow recognized me for what I was, I’m not sure you could have gotten me out. For so long I have been crammed and locked inside a massive box, which was inside another massive box, which was inside another massive box (ad infinitum). Each of these boxes was chained, padlocked and booby trapped and covered in words scrawled in angry black marker…
…Denial…Good Girl…Conformity…Expectations…Insecurity…Fear…
Why?
What combinations of personality and life experiences led me to deny myself for so very long? What convoluted social regulations made it necessary for me to push down, block out, hide away from things I have been feeling and wanting for much of my life? What kind of lies did I have to tell myself to sustain my belief that I could feel and think all those things and still be a good little straight girl?
Why was I so damn afraid to be me?
I never gave voice to this in my life. Not to friends, not in the countless journals I filled with angst and joy and philosophies about the meaning of life and stories about kissing boys. Only in the quietest, darkest corners of my heart and in my wildest silent fantasies did I let this live. I never once spoke of this aloud until meeting my best friend M.(another married lesbian, we’re a more common breed than one might think).
And in having a place to release my feelings they became – for the first time – something real. It was such a relief, such a sweet exhale, to let go of these swirling, mixed up, crazy emotions that had been fighting for acknowledgement for so long. It wasn’t a quick path from there to here; it still took three full years of discussing and processing and agonizing to get to the point where I could accept my sexuality without reservation or denial or apology.
For the past seven months I have been ever so slowly making my way out of that closet and into the light. Every step forward is liberating, every time I am open and honest with the people in my life I feel a little bit lighter and a little more solid at the same time. Every time I am accepted for who I am, I feel myself occupying this new space with more confidence.
But as I move further and further into this new life I also find myself wishing I could have figured this out a little sooner, that I could have been this person a little earlier. I wonder what it would have been like to own my experience on this level when I was 16 or 21 or 28. I wonder what it would have been like to go through my early adulthood knowing and accepting and loving myself this way.
On many levels I get that this was my path. That everything I’ve lived through in the past 32 years was necessary to my journey. That everything I did was something I had to do to get here, to this point, so that I could live THIS exact life. But sometimes I just have to shake my head and laugh that it seemed so hard and took so long and scared me so much – because the reality is incredibly easy. It fits. There is a rightness to this life, a sense of immediate and total belonging, that I’ve never experienced before. This is who I am, without doubt or hesitation. This is me.
And I hope that most of you out there know on a personal level exactly how amazing that is, because there is nothing that compares, and no way I could ever fully explain how it feels.
It’s exciting and calming and electrifying and crazy and easy and it’s just simply good. Yeah. It’s good.
Welcome to the “family”!
By the way, you’re an excellent writer.
congratulations! i envy you, in fact.
love the way you wrote this.
they say you can’t know true love without knowing hate, and that you can’t know true happiness without knowing the sad. you just had to go through those first 32 years as feeling not quite right to be able to experience the amazing feeling of being just right, as you are now.
And I second that you are an amazing writer. I’ve linked you to my blog. I hope you don’t mind.
I can relate so wholly to this scenario. I’m told all the time that I came out when my mind, my soul, and my heart were ready. I too, wish I could have realized my true self sooner. I would have saved myself so much heartache. Ah, such is life.