What Now?

After the couple of bad experiences I had when telling a few people about how I identified with my gender and getting not the response I was hoping for I stated to think about what next. I really wanted to tell everyone, I wanted to shout it from the roof tops. I didn’t want to go back to a closet like I had been in for so long when I was gay. I was wanting some kind of validation, like I got when Pastor Kim said siblings in Christ. That gave me a since of belonging. I wasn’t expecting people to change over night, but I figured if they new how I felt they would make their best attempts.

However the memories of when I told my family and friends that I was gay, just started to consume me. I remembered how heart broken my mom was and how she blamed herself. I remember being told it was just a phase and I was just trying to fit in with the majority of my friends who happened to be gay. I remembered that before I even told my parents that my older sister had told me that if I didn’t straighten up, she would tell my parents and I wouldn’t get anymore help from them with my schooling. All these thoughts terrified me, because I wondered if I would go through all this yet again.

So instead of jumping in with two feet and telling everyone I knew I stated with people I knew would understand and would be able to start using my right pronoun a little easier than others. There were quite a few people that had gone through the YouthOutlook training with me and I knew I could explain to them how introducing myself the way I had during our training made me realize that the gender I was assigned at birth wasn’t inline with how I felt. I started out by telling them, by doing so it slowly trickled through our church, because they started using my pronoun when talking about me. Others in my congregation picked up on it and started asking me questions. This made things so much easier, because I didn‘t have to go around to each individual person and explain.

The next thing was to tell my sister in-law, nephew and father-in-law that lived here, They understood, but didn’t get the whole understanding of the change in pronoun. My father in-law passed away a couple of months later, but I feel like if he was still here, he would have the easiest time at it. As for my sister in-law and nephew they still struggle, but are getting better at it.

I decided to wait to tell my family in the Carolina’s until we went for a visit. I knew they would be so confused and most likely wouldn’t understand. I also wasn’t really concerned about if they did, because I only see them about once a year.

#comingout #YouthOutlook #OpenTableUCC #nonbinary