Does My Happiness Make You Uncomfortable?

There are a lot of people in the world who have a lot of pain and shame associated with being gay. As a new convert into the happy life, I tried to adapt the pain...you know, wanting to fit in with others who identify with me now, as though I changed...but whatever...

But I couldn't. I even tried to care what other people would think if I told them, but I couldn't. I tried to be nervous when telling friends, but that didn't make sense. Most of my friends were happy and even the ones who weren't were artsy new agey people who accepted everybody. So every time I told a friend, they'd say "Congratulations! I wish you happiness!" As a result, my experience was not as dramatic or life altering as I'd hoped it would be. Again, too much made for TV cinema during my formative years.

There seems to be an expectation for happy people to "come out of the closet." I just don't feel that need. I guess it's because I never was in a closet. I dated men, I liked dating men. Now I'm with a woman. It was a life change. There was some leftover church chatter in my brain, but I was already pretty much broken from that as a result of my transition out of indoctrination and into what I really thought. So maybe there is a "coming out of the closet" of sorts: The closet of being molded by the world I was in into something that doesn't make sense to me and then slowly navigating my way out in order to have a life that doesn't raise my cholesterol, make my skin break out, and lead to hypertension...

Trying to make sense of the senseless is a full time job. Not to knock what makes sense to others or their experiences, but my life is not about them. It's about me. And the indoctrination that I experienced does not make sense to me. It didn't when I was in it and now that I'm out, I can look back and see why I thought I was a bad person: because I could not be what I was "supposed" to be, no matter how hard I tried or how many zits and doctor visits I had. Not to mention that even though my indoctrinators knew what perfection was, none of them could demonstrate it. That was frustrating.

Love,
Blue