My Uneventful Internet Closet Exit, a la 2017

So, I feel very strange exploring this facet of my identity publicly, via the Internet, so late in life: But I think I'm slowly realizing I'm gay.
Why announce this on the WWW? Because, I live on an island of straight male laborers. I need a shout out from my homies. Sometimes the Internet really is the extent of my social life. This isn't a reflection of how much I suck. It's a reflection of the fact that I have chosen to make certain lifestyle sacrifices in order to commit to a dream to have a viable career as a teacher and artist, so that someday I may be able to afford to completely be myself.

At first, I thought it was silly to even be thinking about whether I'm gay. Who really cares in the Bay, anymore? But, upon listening to an insistent voice, I realized: I do.

After years of uncomfortably calling myself bisexual, knowing I can enjoy physical and even emotional intimacy with men, I've realized that I just don't see myself with one. Then, at a time in my life that I'm prepared to actually LISTEN to my heart, I accidentally fell in love with a woman- and a really good one. Like, I'm thinking possibly the One. Surprise! To both you and me.

It's not my first girlfriend, nor the first time I've wondered if I'm gay. It's been a 20-year question mark. I've always been very open with myself and others about it, but there has been some confusion. I wasn't sure where I stood with it all, and it bothered me.

When I connected with Carol, things were powerful and fast, a direct line to my soul. I felt like her existence shone a bright sun on me, or maybe a mirror. I just instantly bloomed before her. It was weird. Good weird. We're all still figuring it out of course, What to do with all this sudden color and life.

She gave me an amazing gift: deep, perceptive, dynamic friendship. That's just part of it. But this isn't necessarily about my relationship with her. I may owe a lot of my healing to her, but it's really about my identity. She was instrumental in helping me find that peace, without ever talking about it, just by being a friend who knows herself so beautifully well.

Something changed in me. I stopped binding up how I felt. I woke up one morning, and I realized I had all these clothes in bags I was about to donate because I was feeling like my androgyny was not helping my social self concept. My eyes fell on the bags on this particular morning, and I realized I was throwing away a part of myself. That those clothes reflected the true me, and I was the one who was rejecting it.

All these years of dating men, even loving them, but reaching a deep well of confusion and frustration. Somehow it wasn't balancing out. It was in fact a downward spiral that led me to the bottom of me.

I put on my old clothes and saw myself breathe easier in the face of my mirror. It was one of those vests, you know? One that straight women wear, and look straight. When I wear it, I look like a big old lesbian. Ugh, why did I throw away all those cute flannels? Why did I listen to straight male friends trying to "help" me by letting me know I wasn't exactly looking the part? Why am I beating myself up for preferring my North Face jacket, but still loving being super femme? Why not love and enjoy being a multi-faceted lesbian while I still have 2 months of my mid-30s left? My heart hugged itself. I felt myself tear up from my own inner hug.

How did I go this long without realizing it? I don't say this with judgment, but awe, and little grief for the time lost with myself. Not to mention the misunderstanding of what sexual orientation is about. It's partly about the viability of a lasting loving relationship, at least for me. But an even bigger part is social identity. It's been an icy road out there. I've shared many turns with people- I'm able to appreciate my friends' chapters as becoming mothers and wives, for example, by drawing on my experience as a nanny. I've witnessed friends coming out of the closet, and cheered them from my own bisexual corner, grateful that someone put that "B" in LGBTQ for people like me. It's about knowing there are people like me, at all.

Super gay memories come flooding back... they all make sense. In more recent years, I'm suddenly recounting frequency with which men have asked me: "Are you sure you aren't gay?" To which I always answered, "I don't know," or in my later years, "No. I'm not sure. It's the person."
My 10-year-old obsession with Indigo Girls, and my youthful intrigue when my cousin told me what they WERE. I stared at their picture, feeling crushy. I saved a letter I wrote to Emily as a child and gave it to her after a concert in college. She graciously took it before they climbed into a limo, and I thought, Thanks for showing me what a lesbian songwriter might look like. All my favorite artists were beautiful women. I never gave a crap about those boy bands. My attraction to UC Santa Cruz, which I now recognize as a place that would accept me for who I am. It certainly gave me that.
San Francisco was a surprisingly terrible place to try and understand my identity. Living in the Castro, I was surrounded by gay men who loved me, but where were the women? I remember trying to go to the one lesbian bar in SF alone, in my 20s. Having no idea how to approach those intimidating women, just to become friends, let alone to date. Or years before, when I lived in the dorms, slipping into kisses with a straight girl after a few beers one night... only for her to run away the next morning and never talk to me again.

My experience of women? A combination of entrancement with the feminine, and an intense fear of rejection. The last part has improved greatly, but still persists.

In my 20's, all the women in the queer scene who wouldn't so much as talk to me, because I looked straight. Then there were straight women who teased me so their bored boyfriends would stay with them a little longer. That one is really far too common. Have a little respect, ladies. Don't tease someone you're not into.

But, I'm a hypocrite. It was so much safer and easier to date men. I thought I liked them. They liked me and it seemed rejection proof. I almost married men two, maybe three times. At the last minute one of us always freaked out and bailed. Honestly, it's been a 20-year flashing red light of my inner self trying to warn me: Wrong way! Go back! And me persistently throwing myself in, only to feel that good old life-long feeling of being distinctly out of place. Then I'd try to date women again, which usually ended in dramatic heartache because I didn't have the courage to try and date the kind of women I liked. My girlfriends were always cool, but crazy like me, and I didn't have the self esteem to really push past that and own what I wanted: a healthy girlfriend whose gender recipe floated mine.

We're all allowed to have our spectrums and we don't have to report them. But I want to share the freedom I feel, because I'm happy for myself and I want you to know what that's like. Like a little birthday party for myself. For all the pride parades I've been to, I never really gave that to myself on the inside.

I can't express the subtle joy felt tonight, to have joined a sweet little online Game Night meetup for LGBTQ people, and for the first time in my life not feel like I was a poser. There were no apologies, no questions. It was sublimely uneventful. All these years, I had felt like a poser no matter where I went. Straight crowds don't really feel "bad" per se, as I enjoy people for who they are and vice versa, but I never felt fully recognized. It reminds me of a game my older sisters used to play where they would pretend they couldn't see me. "Where's Danielle?" they'd ask. "I'M RIGHT HERE!" 2-year-old Me would scream. Only that game lasted a few minutes. This was my entire adult life. I'm right here.

LGBT crowds always felt like family, but sometimes I suffered from fear of being ousted by females because I've mostly had boyfriends. Like I said, my confusion about my orientation didn't go over well with the SF hipster lesbians, understandably. I now realize I was just a really late, really dorky bloomer. And I'm okay with all of that.

I don't really care what people think to that degree anymore, and I get to feel my skin breathe deeply from the inside. Settling in, feeling the ache in my heart melt into an unfamiliar sensation of wholeness. I feel right.

I want to cry. It's a good cry. And I want to be out in the sense of just not being alone in this anymore. I want to "be myself" every bit as the next person, because I've just realized that all these years I've been wearing a heavy costume that hid me from myself and now I feel light and free. I want to love myself fully, bravely, holding space for soft people everywhere to stay strong in their softness.

I am free of the heavy costume of self-doubt that created itself out of this sentence that I never want to hear again: "You just haven't met the right man, yet."

Own who you are. If you're an artist who lawyers by day, give yourself a chance to free up that shaky voice. If you're a sailor trying to run the family business, go gentle on them and on yourself, but be strong and cut that cord, and go be near boats. If you're a spiritual woo-woo disguised as a corporate square, or vice versa, come out to yourself and be very peaceful with yourself. Be so unapologetic that you can be completely soft, completely open to the silk dance you can have with your own inner and outer worlds.

When you do, you make it possible for others to really know you. Just being in their presence, you feel warm because they know how you feel. Silky with self-love.

Be a flower cave dinosaur magic monger. Whoever you are, we need you. I need you. And now that I'm more of me, I can see more of you. Let's unwrap that gift already.

My name was supposed to be Daniel, and I once dreamed of my birth, but I was a boy. I don't need to understand that, but somehow I do. We all have our own flavor. Here I am, 20 years late, shaking out my flag and adding a new section to the camp. It may be scary, but at least I've got a spot now.