The world is a dynamic place. Time passes, seasons come and go, people come and go. We all grow and, on occasion, grow up. We switch schools, we switch jobs, we switch mates. Our opinions differ from a year ago, a month ago, hell, a minute ago. This is what life is: change. It’s pretty much the only thing in the world we can depend on. No matter what we do, no matter how hard we try to make it not happen, we will change. Life changes. Life changes us. Whether we like it or not, change is coming, and it’s coming for us.
Personally, I don’t like change too much. Well, okay, I’ll take that back. I like some change. I like it when it’s raining and that changes into sunshine. I like it when day changes into dusk and then into night. I certainly liked it when I changed from a person without a license to one with one. Other changes, however, didn’t sit quite as well with me. I was none too pleased when my grandfather died (or my grandmother or my great-grandmother). I was pretty pissed the first time I got dumped. Even something seemingly awesome, like going to college, had me up in arms. Sometimes, change is for the better, sometimes it’s for the worse, and sometimes it just is. Regardless, I know I have a hard time telling the difference most of the time. I want things to, for the most part, stay the same. I want to stay the same. In a sense, I’d like to perpetuate myself.
Nothing disrupted this more than the day I realized I like girls.
Yeah, okay, sure, that makes sense. I had all these plans to be a happy heterosexual and then, poof, they were all gone. That was part of it, but it wasn’t really the thing that bothered me most. More than anything, the day I realized I was bi was the day I realized that I wasn’t the person I thought I was. I thought that I had, over a period of twenty years, gotten to know myself pretty well and figured out who I was at my very core. To come to the conclusion that I was anything but straight meant that something at my very core had changed. This wasn’t something like picking a new favorite food or hearing a new favorite song; this was actually something about me that was relevant to my everyday life. When I walked down the street, I couldn’t hide from the look I was giving the woman who passed by. While riding the bus, I had to admit that I was smiling at the kid with the rainbow bracelet. There was a reason I had a hard time talking to that girl standing next to the snack table. Of course, I hadn’t actually changed at all. It wasn’t that I wasn’t the same; I had always had these thoughts and feelings. I was still me, I was just admitting it now.
That’s one of the great things about life: something major can happen and it’s not the end of the world. Yes, realizing who you are is a big step, and it’s an amazing one. Coming out is scary, especially when you’re the one you’re doing it to, but it’s also wondrous in that you now know something about yourself that you didn’t know before. Hell, it’s been several years since I came out and I’m still amazed by it. At the same time, it’s not all there is to me. I’m bisexual. I’m also female, into kickball, and a fan of stickers and superhero underwear. I’m a giant nerd who wears glasses and sings everywhere she goes and still for the life of her can’t figure out why people like her. This is who I am, this is who I was, this is who I’m going to be. I’m going to be this person when I’m in grad school and when I have a real job, when I’m single and when I’m somebody’s girlfriend and when I’m married, when I’m a mother or a grandmother or inexplicably an aunt (which, seeing as I’m an only child, will be quite puzzling). All of these things will inform who I am, but none of them will really change me, not the core me. Coming out is a bit like that; my life is now vastly different than it was when I was set to marry a pretty man and have a white picket fence (for example, I thought I was going to marry John Mayer, before John Mayer sold his soul to become a professor in douchebaggetry), but I personally don’t feel all that different. A little more honest, perhaps, but not different.
Change is hard. If it were up to most people (myself included), we’d all be able to pick and choose moments, freeze them, and hold onto them forever. Life would always remain in that perfect moment and we wouldn’t be scared to take risks or leaps or admit things or accept things because we’d know that it wouldn’t actually change anything. We’d know that things would remain perfect and perpetuate and that’d be okay. Thing is, that’s not the deal. We find our footing and life surprises us and knocks us down again. We settle into our roles at school only to change schools. We find someone we love only to leave them only to find someone else worth trying with. We look into ourselves and come to terms with that thing that’s been gnawing at us lately. It’s not simple, but it is necessary. You see, if the world didn’t change, we’d never learn about who we really are. That self, the one that doesn’t change, we’d never really know that person if everything around us stayed the same. More importantly, we’d never know that the discovery of these things isn’t, in the long run, a huge deal. We may be gay, we may be lesbian, we may be bi, we may be trans, we may be questioning or queer, but we are still us and the world, this crazy world that does everything in it’s power not the stay the same, will still accept us, still love us. In the end, we are still us. We are still good.
[...] talk about coming out a lot. A LOT. I talk about it coming out to your parents, to your friends, to strangers. I talk about it being a political move. I talk about not coming out if it’s [...]