Closets

an essay about coming out

Every queer person has a coming out story, and no two are alike. Coming out can happen in many stages, over months, years, or longer. Everyone’s closet looks different. There are, of course, the jokes about glass closets, but there’s much more than that. Some closets feel cozy and comfortable at first, but can turn out to be suffocating. Some are locked and sealed, on the outside by others, but oftentimes locked from the inside. Some are like escape rooms, requiring puzzle solving and deep thinking to get out of.

My closet was definitely on the more complicated side. Over the years, there have been many moments in my life when I thought I came out. My very first first coming out was when I was talking to all of my month-long friends about our crushes in my very first semester of college. I heard one friend talk about how they were so obsessed with a cool sophomore who lived in our dorm, and I started to feel the same way after hearing them gushing. I thought, If my friend is bisexual, maybe I could be too. But at that point I had never even dated a guy, and the thought of dating a girl seemed even more overwhelming. So I didn’t fully take on the bisexual label at first, but I always had it in the back of my mind.

I had a boyfriend for a bit, but I was always a bit on the fence about the relationship. When we broke up right before my junior year, I was feeling a lot more confident and was excited to get back out there. I decided to try to date both men and women and ended up hitting it off with a cute girl from the climbing gym. We met up at a house party organized by some other queer students, and spent the night drinking mystery beverages from a Gatorade cooler and dancing in the living room. We kissed for the first time on the dance floor, and I felt electrified. This was my second coming out. Now that I had kissed a girl, I felt like I could confidently identify as bi.

For all of college, I would let some genuine parts of me show, but I was always being mindful not to stray too far from the norm. I could be a little bit myself, as long as it was palatable for everyone else. I had my hair cropped to my chin and a nose ring, but I still dressed pretty feminine and mostly dated men. Even after college ended, I continued to stick with that. It had been working for me so far, and I was too distracted by a new job and new city to think about how it affected me too much.

A few months after moving to Seattle, I started dating a guy. He was sweet, smart, and seemed to really like me, so I decided, why not date him? After a while, I started to feel a little lost and unhappy, but I chalked it up to the general malaise that comes with being in your twenties. Looking back on it now, I was deeply sad. Nothing really made sense to me. I had done all of the things I was supposed to do: I went to a nice college, got a nice job, and dated a nice boy. This is the plan that had been ingrained in me since childhood, from parents, teachers, peers, and society. It became so ingrained I just assumed it was my own idea at a certain point. But year after year, I could feel the discontentment eating away at me more and more. I was constantly worried if I was wasting my youth, despite doing all of the same fun things as the rest of my peers.

When I turned 25, I realized I was officially halfway through my twenties, and I truly felt like I had wasted them. That feeling hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to change, no matter how scary it seemed. I moved to a different neighborhood, broke up with my boyfriend, and started going to events around the city to make new friends. When I realized the thing I felt like I was missing out on the most was exploring my sexuality, I focused on dating women. And that is when everything clicked. I finally felt like I had fully come out of the closet once I identified as a lesbian.

After fully coming out, I felt like my true self for the first time in my adult life. I slowly began to realize how much of myself I was ignoring all these years. I had technically been out since my first year of college, but I learned that realizing your identity and accepting it can be two different challenges. I felt like I had come out of the bisexual closet only to discover another closet. Coming out of that first closet only required me to recognize my desires, but the second was much more complicated, and coming out of that one meant I needed to reckon with all of the things I internalized about what kind of life I should have. Once I realized I could shed these expectations when it came to my sexuality, my whole world opened up. If being straight didn’t work for me, there were probably so many other things in my life not working for me that I could change too. How many other closets were in my life?

I noticed so many other expectations of my life that I thought were mine but had really just been drilled into me. I didn’t have to get married, have kids, and move to the suburbs if I didn’t want to. I could hop around to different jobs instead of working my way up the corporate ladder like I thought I should. I could organize my whole life the way I wanted and the way that worked best for me, even if what I was doing was different than everyone else.

Gay or straight, I think we all have closets. They’re the tight and constricting structures that keep us from going after what we truly want out of life because we like to stick with what we already know and what is already expected of us. These closets are preconceived notions that have become so deeply ingrained in us that we forget they were never our ideas to begin with. But every closet has a door, and the trouble it takes to come out is far outweighed by the feeling of freedom.