I've struggled with this for years now and have tried to accept it off and on. I go through periods of acceptance then I go through periods where I feel like this isnt me whatsoever for weeks at a time.
Is this normal? I dont think this is just a fetish.. why do these feelings keep coming back and how can I accept them and keep them so they dont go away again? I just want to feel good about my life again.
At the moment the thought of living my life in secrecy, never being able to tell close friends because it would just be too risky to do so.
Help me
I can tell you, as a survivor from the time when most gay people were closeted, that that kind of secrecy just ate at the edges of my mind.
The problem was not that nobody knew. If I could have ever been sure of that, it would not have been a problem.
"Wait, what did he just say? Does he know?"
"No, I can't wear this shirt. I love it, but people might start thinking."
"Sorry, I never learned to dance (I am afraid I would look gay)."
"Never learned to sing, either (afraid I would sound gay)."
"Is he on to me? I can't talk to him anymore..."
"I never watched that movie, even though everybody else watched it (it had a gay character in it)"
That secret just kept on getting bigger, in my head, the more I tried to sit on it. It became more and more of a distraction. I was never really a very sexual person at all, but because of the fact that the sexuality that I DID have was one that I was trying to keep secret, it intruded on everything in my entire life. It took over.
I will tell you what worked for me. I had a particular peer-group that I knew were likely LGBT supporters, and I never actually told them I was gay. I just saw them as such perceptive people, I assumed that they knew without me telling them, so since I imagined (maybe correctly) that they already knew, I could be more my normal self. I got myself convinced that, with those people, "I might as well be out, since it would be weird if they didn't know." They were aware of gay people, and they were not really hostile toward gay people. It was not a big subject in their minds. It just got mentioned between them, from time to time.
I don't think that I would have wanted to know them if they had put a fine point on being pro-gay and been very outward about being LGBT allies. That would have intimidated me...I wanted to know them because, around them, I was pretty sure that it would NOT be a very noteworthy subject if I were openly gay. I didn't want to know them because I thought they would be embracing and supportive. I wanted to know them because they would have been bored. I felt they would have thought it was stupid if I thought they cared.
It gave me security. In a way, it kept me from coming out for a while. That is the irony. I kept believing the people around me already know, based on some sort of horse-sense I believed they had, so I could avoid actually saying it longer because I went around pretending that it had already been said, just not in words.
Eventually, they were the only people I wanted to see (because the other douchebags in my life made me nervous), and when I eventually did come out to somebody who was a stranger and outside my usual peer-group, it just felt normal. Maybe it was just wishful thinking by me, but when I told that guy, I had the point-of-view that all of my friends that were still in my life "already knew because how could they not know?" and it was just kind of natural.
As for how to accept yourself, only you can make up your mind about that.
