Let the Secret Out

This is a post I wrote awhile ago around the time I first came out on a different blog. Needed to remind myself that I was right to let my "secret" out and felt it needed a repost.

I was watching Glee the other day and I feel that this scene really captured the way I feel and to some extent captures the essence of the response I have received. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGASGDFUVEs

Now thankfully no one has told me to leave and never come back. In fact, what I have heard from those I have told is that they still love me and I am very grateful for that. However, like that last part of the clip, it feels like those I care about would have preferred I kept it a secret. Those that I have told have known that this is something I have struggled with and all but one person basically told me that they have always known and had a feeling that that's what I was going to tell them. One even said, "Duh. You had a neon sign over your head proclaiming it." From a few conversations I've had now though, it seems that my dear Christian friends and family would have rather me continue struggling in misery, hating myself daily for not being able to deny my "sinful" nature instead of accepting myself and embracing who I am so that for the first time in my life I am happy. (Tears well up in my eyes as I say this now because, I kid you not, I have never felt true happiness before the moment I accepted myself completely.)

I don't know if anyone who has not experienced it can know how keeping a secret like that can eat you up inside. Like Santana said in the clip, its a battle inside yourself and if you are a conservative Christian I feel that battle is so much bigger. For me personally, keeping that secret has scarred me in many ways but I'll just name them for now. Self-loathing, bearing a huge burden of guilt and shame, living in a constant state of depression, almost non-existent self-esteem, drive toward perfectionism, OCD, suicidal ideation, self-mutilation, and there's more but you get the idea. That's how I lived everyday of my life up until a few months ago. I had been doing some intensive therapy and I realized that this "choice" this "sin" was not going to go away. I had finally healed from a lot of other things but the butch lesbian inside of me wasn't going anywhere. It was then that I knew I had to make the choice to embrace her because at this point the only other option was death. I wasn't going to live in my self-loathing misery for one more day.

So to Christian friends and family, this is why I will not keep it a secret. This is why I will no longer struggle and suffer in misery. God doesn't make mistakes and Jesus accepts us just how we are. If I'm sinning, then God and I will have that conversation when I get to heaven. I may get there and have the most tarnished and unadorned crown in the building but at least I'll have gotten there when God decided it was my time and not when I took my own life because I hated myself so much.

And if there is anyone out there reading this who is like me, don't give up hope and if you do nothing else, accept yourself because Jesus does.