I’ve recently come out as gay. But it’s not that I knew but didn’t tell anyone. It’s also not exactly true that I don’t know myself. It’s more like I suppressed it in myself. That somewhere along the line, as a child, I figured out that I had to be attracted to women to be safe, or to be considered normal, and kind of locked away my true feelings… or maybe more accurately, ignored them, and kind of left them to die on the vine. Now that I’ve had this realization about myself, it feels like I’m regrowing entire parts of my personality. I went through this process of … like … having to talk to the gay part of me and apologize to him, and forgive myself, and slowly integrate him into me, until the person I was before coming out was kind of gone… or maybe more accurately I recognized that personality for the mask that it was? I feel like he’s a stranger now. It’s been so exciting and so healing in so many ways, but also terrifying and overwhelming. There are days I wake up and feel free and whole for the first time. There are days that I wake up and feel completely broken. And it’s like the emotional stakes for everything are so so so much higher now, and yet I’m better equipped to deal with them… but that doesn’t stop me from feeling my feelings. I think maybe that’s the crux of it… that for four decades of my life, I didn’t allow myself to feel lots of things. It kept me “safe” and it exhausted me at the same time.