The Idea Of Coming Out
This may seem silly to anyone who reads this blog with any regularity. I do believe I’d need to publish with a great deal more frequency to even have “regulars”, but I want to discuss the concept of coming out.
I say it may seem silly because I have been publishing content on Instagram and blogging about my journey with gender for a few years now, but there’s been, even if totally false, a layer of anonymity to my content. Screaming into the void as I have been calling it. It has been very cathartic and helpful but it has also been, in a manner of speaking, private.
I have had plenty of conversations and have come out to my spouse and my close family, but that’s been as far as I have been comfortable taking it. Sure I attend business networking events in leggings and wear cropped t-shirts with the family in the neighborhood but actual conversation about my gender identity with other people? Nope.
For one thing, many of my closest friends aren’t local. For another much of the world around me is busy with their own things. Neighbors are all busy raising their own children and my business colleagues have plenty of pressure to build their own businesses. I do attend a monthly men’s group but I haven’t felt safe enough to share my identity with them yet.
Also, I feel, it is something that many people want me to bring up. There is a general acceptance of the greater queer community but it is a polite, almost cold, acceptance. The phrase, “I don’t care how you present”, comes up a bunch, but this coldness stifles the conversation. It makes me feel like I had better just move on and talk about other things, namely the weather or the 24-hour news cycle. I guess I just have felt a general pressure to keep my mouth shut. People don’t care.
People Do Care
This past weekend I had the great fortune to go camping with my best friends. Every year for nearly a decade we’ve gotten together to do something adventurous outside. From Colorado 14ers to the north shore of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula and the foggy forest mountains of Appalachia, we get together and share some time in the wilderness. This past weekend was no different, except that it was very different.
My two friends were not unaware of my personal journey but they had really only witnessed it from afar. From my Instagram posts and this here blog, they have had a window but not a conversation or any legitimate access to talk with me, or me with them, about all the things I have been exploring and experiencing.
Much of that is because I was too chickenshit to say anything. In fact, on our trip last year, we spent a few sopping wet days trudging through the wettest wilderness I have ever experienced in Dolly Sods National Wilderness in West Virginia and basically left the entire topic undiscussed. Perhaps last year was different. I hadn’t done nearly enough work on my own anxieties and inner child to be ready to share with them where I was. I wasn’t sure if I would be ready this year either.
In some ways, I wasn’t entirely ready. But I was ready to dress like I wanted. So I did. I packed my clothes and jumped on a plane bound for Virginia with a ton of anxiety about what would happen.
Walking through Shenandoah National Park wearing what makes me feel me was great and the anxiety about being with friends who have known me for 30 years was melted away with the euphoria of actually presenting the way you want. We hiked for two full days before the conversation turned to my gender expression.
My heart stopped beating then it exploded into a million beats per minute and my emotions washed over me. It was so much. Entirely positive. It was easier to talk about it than I expected but it was more emotional and healing than I expected too. Sharing yourself with folks who have known you your entire life and hearing them share their support and love was amazing.
People do care, they care deeply, but it takes effort on both sides of the relationship to express those cares and actually discuss real things. It was pleasant to hear their curiosities and ideas about my gender expression and fashion, but perhaps what was the most powerful thing to me was how foreign the concept of exploring a new gender expression was to them. They were honest that they had no common ground from which to draw upon. They were entirely unfamiliar with what I have been exploring and living with all these years.
To me that was powerful. It helped me better understand my place in the universe. Interestingly I found it helpful, even powerful. Sure my closest friends have no common ground on this particular aspect of my life but it certainly validated my experience. My uniqueness was laid bare, lonely sure, but 100% mine.
Going Further
In many ways, the conversation we had in a small campsite by a creek I do not know the name of not too far from Skyline Drive was just the preface. We discussed more on the car ride back to Richmond and into the evening on my buddy’s back porch eating our traditional beef tenderloin cooked in the wood coals of a hot fire. But so much hasn’t been discussed. And that is okay.
Coming out is a spectrum. For me it has been slowly gaining steam in my life. I have been learning and exploring, in public, and privately, and I have found my voice with my friends. I have a lot further to go but from where I am standing today the way ahead looks the best it has ever looked.
