The endless process of coming out
As we turn the corner into summer, I find myself reflecting on the intention to deepen my writing practice this year. I love sitting down to shape a little piece of art, without deadlines or sales targets, just commitment and desire, because not everything needs to be driven by productivity, accomplishment and financial goals.
Creating a piece of writing every few weeks isn’t something flippant and quick, it’s frustrating, joyful, terrifying, liberating, necessary and time consuming. This practice has allowed me acknowledge the things within me that need to live out in the world. I continue to wrestle with truth and silence, constantly seeking out the edge of my own discomfort. Mending the pulls in the fabric of myself and stitching back together the places where I have separated from myself, to support greater integration and understanding within and around me. I write not because I think my journey is particularly unique or interesting but because it isn’t unique or interesting at all. It’s just very ordinary.
Each word, sentence and post its own coming out, a deepening into greater awareness, exploration, acceptance and synthesis of my own enoughness. I can trace my finger around each transition point of becoming myself more fully — non-linear, sometimes backwards and often repeating. Writing feels like a quiet place where I can be myself and tell the truth because I believe in the infectious power of truth telling. When I came out as sober people were kind and supportive, dealing me out of the alcohol tab when the check arrived after dinner and stocking the fridge with my favorite seltzers when I came over to visit. When I came out to a few friends as bisexual twenty years ago, it was a much different experience, which lead to me bury this part of myself in deep shame for a long time. Sharing my queerness with loved ones and friends in the past few years has been a very healing and liberating experience. When I told people about my divorce, folks had a variety of strong reactions that mostly had to do with their internalized beliefs around marriage and divorce. The process of coming out is continuous.
Recently, I learned that I have both autism and ADD — neat combination where each one kind of masks and exacerbates the other. Throughout my life people around me pointed out, often in cruel ways and occasionally in a gentle ways, how I moved through the world differently, but nobody could precisely explain my quirkiness. Why I am constantly overwhelmed by sensory input, why getting dressed is debilitating, why social dynamics often feel like a foreign language, why my ability to feel the emotions in the room can be so intense it hurts, why playing a game makes me want to cry, why walking into a room of people makes me frozen or why holding eye contact and translating my kinesthetic experience of the world into words is an almighty effort. When I got sober six years ago, all of these things got worse — much worse. Alcohol played a big role in buffering the intensity of the world and allowing me to mask my social challenges. Now, with my sobriety and this new understanding, I find myself looking back over my life with clear soft eyes and inside I feel more solid.
If I come out to my community as an autistic, queer, sober, (and much more..) clinician, I wonder what will happen? Will I still be loved, worthy and enough? Or do folks need to hold another version of me, a false one, in order to believe in me as an intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, caring, capable, loving, therapist, friend, colleague and human. I feel the separation from myself, and all the ways we overtly and covertly tell people to separate from themselves at the expense of themselves in order to maintain the status quo. Then I remember the words of Judith Herman, when you have a movement (or an identity) that challenges the power structure, you’re going to have a backlash.” So maybe folks will experience the echos of internalized cultural and historical bias when they read this or maybe folks will feel more freedom to hold the complex truth of their own identity, or maybe folks will feel both of these things at the same time.
Either way, I will stay close to myself.
We are all already enough.
Happy pride month! xx