I so badly want to come out, but I cant, and It's so dumb!

Hi

I'm 21 years old and at this point in my life I want to scream from the rooftops 'I LIKE GIRLS' just so everyone knows, I'm so comfortable with who I am that I want the world to know who I am.

But I just cant do it! I cant get over this fear that builds in my chest every time I hear the word 'gay' mentioned around me, I'm even scared of expressing admiration for anything rainbow colored - Freaking rainbow! - just in case someone goes 'Aha. She likes rainbows. That means she likes GIRLS!!!'

I'm terrified of telling my family because I don't know how they'll respond, I'm terrified of telling my friends even though I know they'll have positive reactions, I'm terrified of telling my best friend of 5+ years even though her mother runs a freaking LGBTQIA+ CHARITY and her aunt is trans, even though I know she'll respond fine to it.

I'm just terrified and I dont think I'm ever going to be not-terrified. I dont want to lose a single person in my life yet I think telling people means I will lose someone and I don't want to gamble about who that will be.

I have major anxiety and depression of which I'm medicated for in secret, my family, most of my friends, and none of my co-workers know about this, only my doctors, 3 friends, and my entire twitter following (it's a mostly anon acct) and I know those things are huge factors in it.

On the 6.20.2017 I decided to write a coming out letter to my friends, with the express plan to send it to them ASAP. Clearly that didn't happen, though I plan to maybe send it in the new year? Who knows really. The only reason I haven't sent it so far is that it's my moms 50th birthday next month and all my friends are invited and if for some bizarre reason they choose to not accept me they wont come to her party and I dont want them to disappoint my mom. I tend to put other peoples happiness before my own 100% of the time.

I also have this dumbass picture saved on my computer from parks and rec, i've had it saved for two years. It's a picture of Leslie Knope from parks and rec that just says 'I... Gay' and some days I entertain the idea of just putting that on facebook and just seeing what peoples reactions are and then being super mature and saying 'haha my friend did that' if everything goes south.

God whoever decided that at the age of 21 in the UK you're legally an adult needs to be sat down and spoken to because I swear if I was an adult I would probably not be such a massive baby.

Anyway I dont think I had any form of question here but it was just really nice to type that all out at midnight on a work night. If you have any input on how I can stop being so dumb and just not be terrified of everything I'D LOVE that advice. I mean I'll be too terrified to follow it but it'll be greatly appreciated nonetheless

 

I still have the letter yes, this is the 'draft' of it, it's quite long:

'Hi Guys

I’m not going to lie in this letter, so far this is the first time i’ve written it, maybe i’ll send this one, or maybe i’ll re-write it ten times.

I’ve always known something was different about me, I can't pinpoint exactly when it was that I realized what it was, but I know now for sure. I’m gay. I like girls like most of you (I think) like guys, and I’m okay with that. It took me a long time to be okay with that. I hope you are too, but there’s a lot of hate in this world, and a lot of people have been raised with that hate ingrained into them by parents or peers, so if you’re not okay with it, I’m sorry you feel that way but this is who I am.

I have been scared for a long time to tell anybody about this, the only places I’ve ever really been able to be myself is on Twitter and Tumblr, so if you follow me on those, you probably already know. And I thank you for not saying anything, even if sometimes I wish you would have, it’s better it’s happening this way.

I haven’t told my family yet, or anybody who isn’t in this chat, I would appreciate it if you kept this to yourselves for the time being, even if you’re not okay with it, please don’t tell anybody else. I don’t know how my parents will react and I don’t want it to get back to them without my consent. Something is telling me that their reaction won't be a good one, so I want to make sure I am stable both mentally and financially before I tell them.

I’m tired of being scared of who I am, I’m tired of people not knowing.

This doesn’t change anything about me at all, I’m still the same REDACTED you’ve known for years, I’ll always be that person no matter who I choose to love.

I have cried whilst writing this letter, it took me a long time to even write the words ‘I’m gay’, the letters looked so threatening.

For years I have tried to pretend this isn’t who I am, I’ve lied to myself so many times. ‘I’m just pan’ is the first lie I told myself ‘It’s not girls I like, it’s their personalities’, I lived under this lie for over a year, and I was fine with it, because at least being pan didn’t mean I was gay, a pan person doesn’t have to come out, not really.

Then I moved onto another lie, the Bi Lie™ as i like to call it. About a year ago I began to accept that my attraction to women went a lot further than their personalities, whenever I imagined my future, marriage, children, I imagined that with a woman by my side. So I told myself the Bi Lie™ - Because once again, I felt if I called myself a Bi, I didn’t have to come out, because then I could still end up with a man, and I didn’t want to lie to people and say I liked girls, even though I did.

I even dated two guys in this period, I even had sex with one of them, none of you know about this. I felt so disgusting that I didn’t tell a soul. Their names were REDACTED and REDACTED and I met them both on ######, I’m not going into more details about those two, but this time was when the Bi Lie™ began to break down and I ended up in a pretty dark place.

Everyone knows about the Pulse shooting last year, just over a year ago on the day I’m writing this. I threw up that day, everywhere I looked I saw this horrific act of hate against the people who were just like me, everyone on facebook was suddenly an ally of the LGBT+ community, everyone changed their facebook photo to have the pride flag filter, everyone except me and many other closeted people across the world.

For you changing your profile picture was an act of support for the victims of Pulse, you felt sad, disgusted over what happened.

I felt fear, and intense fear that made me scared to go outside, a fear that made me physically sick. A fear that made me look like an insensitive person, because in the sea of pride flags, my profile picture remained unchanged, because i was so scared that if I changed my picture, someone would figure it out, someone would figure it out and hurt me the way the victims of Pulse were hurt. I still feel this fear.

So as I said, this happened around the time that the Bi Lie™ was breaking down, I was beginning to accept myself as a gay woman - as a lesbian - and this event took me back, a long time. If Pulse had never happened, I may have been writing this letter this time last year.

For the past year I have been battling my own brain, trying to tell it to shut up every time it bought up the ‘gay thing’, I tried to ignore my attraction to girls.

I finally began to accept myself in November of last year, I decided to join a LGBT+ safe forum called Empty Closets, so that I could finally air things out, so I could begin to be who i am in a safe space. Turned out i kinda used twitter for that instead. I barely ended up using this website, I read a lot of the things on the forum, but I didn’t interact with it as much as I thought I would, so instead I began to use twitter as my Gay Outlet™, I knew some people from school still followed me, but in the long run I decided that I didn’t care, because they barely tweeted anymore, and if they did happen to see my tweets, well I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

So here I am now, it’s 1am on the 22nd of June, Wednesday. Most people in this chat are coming round my house tonight, to say a goodbye to REDACTED and play some games, and I know I’m not sending this letter today, but I have a feeling I’m going to feel much happier tonight than i have in a while, because I’m writing it all down.

So I don’t know if that’s it, but it feels like I can stop typing now. Thanks for reading.

- REDACTED

UPDATE: 21.08.1

It’s been 2 months since I wrote this first letter and really I don’t want to change anything about it. In these two months I’ve become a lot more open about who I am, I’ve stopped agreeing with people when they say a guy is hot, and i’ve just been blanking questions like ‘have you got a boyfriend’ etc instead of thinking of ‘non gay’ replies. I’ve also been losing my filter which isn’t great.

The internet community has helped me a lot with this, and I actually think I’m going to be sending this letter soon. I’m terrified, but I’m also excited to finally be me around some of the people I love the most, you guys.'