I Came Out
After years of self-hatred, guilt, fear and loneliness I decided to come out to a friend of mine. She is one of my best friends from school. Anyway. this happened about a month ago when I went on holiday to London with this friend and a week earlier I told her that I was going to reveal something about me that might shock her. She's very curious so she wanted me to tell her right then and there; But I wanted to do this when I was as far away from home as possible. The first night we got there we had just unpacked and were preparing to go to bed (she's a girl and I'm a guy and we were going to sleep in the same bed, weird I know) and she reminded me about my "confession". I was hoping that she had forgotten about it but no such luck. I started thinking that it wouldn't be such a good idea to tell her on the first day of the holiday; what if coming out to her would ruin the entire holiday? I told her that I would tell her on the last day of our 10-day holiday, but she wouldn't give in. She kept bugging me and telling me to spit it out and I came close to telling her but each time I felt completely incapable of admitting it. It was really weird cos I knew that I wanted to say it, I had weighed the pros and cons of coming out and understood the importance of doing this but after so many years hiding it, I just couldn't say it! So she started throwing guesses at what it might be that I had to tell her. She asked me if I was doing drugs, if I was an alcoholic, she even asked me if I had killed someone! Finally she asked if I was gay and I said "Yes". For about 10 seconds she didn't say anything... it was so terrifying because I didn't know how she would react. And then she was like "that's it? I thought you were going to say something that would shock me". I felt so unimaginably relieved! It was such a liberating feeling finally letting another human being know about it. However I really wished that she was a bit more supportive. She told me that I was over-exaggerating the whole thing and that it was stupid of me to sacrifice so many years trying to be someone I'm not and to get over it already. I understood what she meant. I feel guily for having wasted away a huge chunk of my youth being miserable and alone...but at the same time I understand the risks of coming out in my country. I live in a small and very conservative country and so many things can go wrong if people find out that I'm gay. For a long time I couldn't accept my sexuality because I was told that being gay was a sin and I knew that if I "gave in" to my sexuality I'd never have a family of my own. This is still something that hasn't changed about the country I live in but I have now accepted the possibility of leaving and trying to make a life somewhere away from here. I have accepted who I am and I know exactly what would make me happy and I'm going to work on reaching my happiness.
There, that's my coming out story. Writing it down gave me a certain feeling of closure. This is something that I wanted to do for so long and I did it :) thanks for reading.
