Looking Back, Facing Forward

Something I have struggled a great deal with in the process of coming out and reassessing my spirituality has been dealing with the many relationships built up over 20 years of being an active Latter-day Saint. After hiding my sexuality for so long, and trying very hard to be the "strong" one, the "orthodox" one, it has been extremely difficult for me to face telling my LDS friends that I am gay and that I no longer have the testimony that I once had. There are a couple of my LDS friends who know, but even there the friendship has drifted since I am no longer an active church participant. LDS life revolves so much around the church and church members--at least, mine certainly did--that it is a bit like being on a merry-go round...once you jump off, the people who are still on it quickly become a whirl of colour and sound that is impossible to focus on or communicate with. And it is hard for those on the merry-go round to communicate with those who are not on it.

The other problem is that I am conflict-averse. Odd, given my choice of career (law), but nevertheless true: I hate conflict with others, especially people for whom I have strong feelings or with whom I have close ties. I remember in my first year of university having a big argument with one of my best friends from high school who was attending the same university as me and lived in the same student residence as I did. He resented my plunging into the LDS young singles life and let me know he thought it was foolish. I ended up avoiding him for the rest of the semester, even skipping certain classes to stay away from him. It was really stupid, created needless pain, and ended up wrecking a good friendship which, while it later was rekindled, was never the same thereafter.

I feel like I have chosen that route again...rather than face my fears and tell my LDS friends that I am gay, I push them away. I hate doing it, but I guess I am too much of a control freak who wants to not be in the vulnerable position of opening myself up to others when I don't know how they will respond. Sure, some will probably be supportive, but I expect others not to be. The people I have told about my struggles with depression have had mixed reactions; those who have themselves experienced depression were the most supportive, along with those who had close family members who had experienced it; others really were pretty clueless, representative of the great misunderstanding and fear of mental illness. I fear worse reactions about revealing that I am gay. After all, while I have been working through this for nearly 3 decades, they will be hearing it for the first time, and may want in some cases to come to the rescue on their white horse, urging me to try harder, to go to reparative therapy, to find a nice girl and settle down, etc. etc. etc. In one case I find particularly hard, I dated a girl that I asked to marry me, with the support of her parents who were, apart from her, my friends. I have a lot of history with this family; how can I now tell them I tried to marry their daughter and sister and drag her into the potential nightmare of later discovering she had married a gay man? I sometimes wonder if she rejected my proposal because she sensed something was amiss in my sexuality. Maybe she noticed my lack of enthusiasm for kissing, something I had never done before her and which she pushed me to do, and which did absolutely nothing for me (no shooting stars or anything like that...sound surprising? haha) Still, her family was on my side to a great extent, so to hear this now would be hard for them and could result in some really bitter recriminations.

I think some of this fear I have and/or need to control others' reactions to me stems perhaps from childhood experiences with my father, who could get very angry and whose anger was out of my control and could not be mollified (you just had to wait for him to cool off). I think I grew to try to avoid other's anger by putting myself down before others had a chance to do so. My reactions now are, I guess, a continuation of that type of behaviour, only in a different guise perhaps.

I really need to change this about myself, because it has been creating a lot of stress for me that I don't need. But I know it will not be an easy pattern of behaviour to break, and I need to be patient with myself. I am grateful for each day I have to try to make little steps forward, with the hope that these little steps will eventually be the mile I need to travel to overcome this. And every worthwhile journey takes time and effort, and begins with a first few hesitant steps, to be followed one hopes in time by more confident strides. As John Kennedy said in his inaugural address: "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."