Hey guys! I am an 18 year old male whose life was just rolling along a couple of months ago. Only I could have wrecked the life I was living the way I did. So.. what was my life like before coming out? My life was really calm, I had nothing to worry about. My mother was taking care of the housekeeping and has a full time job as well, my brother and sister were minding their own business and my stepfather also has a full time job. My father and stepmother were living their own (new age) lives and were minding their own business as well. I do not really have much contact with my father and my stepmother, mostly because if I don't contact them, they won't contact me either. So I kinda gave up on them. Anyhow, those are the people with whom I share my daily life (except for my father and stepmom). Now let me tell a bit more about myself so you will understand how I got so confused. As you know, I am an 18 year old male. I just left Dutch 'middelbare school' to join a Dutch 'hogeschool' (the English term for it would be University of Applied Sciences). I have an internet addiction and enjoy knowing everything there is to know. However, I am too distracted by my internet addiction to even bother doing anything. I mostly spent all my time at home in my room, browsing the infinite interwebz. I didn't care about where my life was headed, my opinion and didn't care about money, friends, family, carreer, relationships, sexuality, feelings and hobbies. To make it short: I was an ice cold person who didn't give a shit about his own life or someone else's. At some point in April this year, I met a guy on an internet website. Normally I wouldn't even bother starting a conversation, but somehow this conversation just kept going. After a while I began to start having feelings for this anonymous person. And I knew he was male, he told me so. So this started all of the stuff that was about to happen. I fell in love with a guy (a GUY! :eusa_doh and I could no longer ignore the fact that I like guys. This made such a deep impact on me though, it is completely going to the change the life I was living. You have to know that I actually hated gays very much. A gay guy touched me in certain places when I was 15 years old. I had no idea what to make of it and I indoctrinated myself with the thought that I am 100% straight and that gay guys should be locked up. This thought was rather easy to create and keep alive because I live in the Dutch bible belt. (Only a few decades ago gays would be banned from communities and the old folks living here still don't like the thought of people being gay.) So now I hated myself really badly. I was sitting at school working on a project with a couple of guys and I really missed my e-boyfriend. But I hated myself for hating myself and thinking about my boyfriend :lol: This feeling kept growing and I could not ignore it because I knew the truth. At some point I could no longer eat normally and every bite of bread would almost make me vomit. I realised I had to tell the people I live at home with. This pulled me into a deep, dark depression. This depression ate 10kg of body weight away in 7 days time. (I could no longer eat because of it so my body started consuming itself. Every bite of food was a bite too much.) After some time I could no longer handle the depression, I almost failed school and was losing myself at a rapid rate.. It was either suicide or telling them. So I pulled myself together and told them. They weren't really upset about it, my sister actually loved it. They just couldn't understand how I could torture myself so badly. This didn't really feel like a relief or anything, I still hated the fact that I hated myself. Then my body started to change, it was as if I got bipolar disorder or something. At a moment I was really happy and secure of myself and a couple of hours later I was depressed and insecure again. In time these waves of emotions faded away a bit more and my life got back on track. But different.. I knew it was so easy to fall back into the person I once was so I promised myself to change. I met a couple of new friends and joined a gay students guild to make new friends (and gay family :lol. After a while I got my emotions and lust for company back, I saw my life turn for the better. I also started missing the presence of a father in my life (after four years of not having one), so I told my dad that he was a bad dad and I kinda quit my relationship/contact with him. And just as I was changing, I had to go back to school.. So where am I at now? I still feel the side effects of the depression I had four months ago. I have a lot more feelings and I cry when I think back of my depression. I have a lot more friends I actually share interest with and I feel more like a human being. But I am still coping with some problems. You see, I do this IT education for which I will have to attend three more years. And the people on this education aren't really my people, they game a lot (I hate gaming because it killed my life) and many of them aren't the most social guys that exist. I also fear I will have to work with a lot of people like this in the future and to become a human code generator and I also fear that I can't be myself because being gay isn't very appreciated in our IT economy. I also notice I sit a lot behind my computer doing the stuff I did months back all over again, even though I promised myself to stop. And I can't get any friends on my education because I have to talk about games or 9gag memes to be accepted. (That is also the reason my best friend left me in the first year.. he could no longer handle the gamers.) So I am having a dilemma.. I refuse to become a gamer. I don't want to become a code junkie (even though you get a lot of $). I don't want to lose myself to my computer. I want to come out to my friends. I want to discover myself and the world. I am so different from the guys on my education... I feel myself gliding down the path of depression again and there is not one day that goes by without me thinking of suicide.. I also don't know if I'm really gay or just screaming for attention. I know I kissed three guys, loved one and dragged two to my bed but I am just sooo confused. Too confused to think clearly :eusa_doh: School and jobs need my attention, but I can't give them any.. My mind is frozen and I don't know what to do. I feel like quitting school but I know that isn't going to help since I would be stuck behind my computer all over again. I can't stop the world from turning to get someone who can help me without missing anything. :tears: What the hell am I supposed to do?? :help: EDIT: Also, why do I sometimes feel like acting really really gay/feminine?
I think a good start would be maybe just experimenting with some of your hobbies . It sounds like you have spent a lot of your life in the virtual world and haven't really been able to find other things that you really enjoy. It could turn out that you like hiking or singing or something. This is the first step. After you find something you enjoy, find other people who enjoy it as well. Keep in mind that what you find out you like might not necessarily be a career. However, it will allow you to connect with a new social group that you might not have met. Not only that, but finding these hidden talent might give you the confidence to be able to be more open about these feelings you are having. If you can find a group of friends outside work, it could be very good for your overall well being. If what you love so happens to be something that you could turn into a job, just think of that as an extra bonus. Knowing who you are and what you like will lead you to a career that fits you better. The fact that you act really gay/feminine could mean that you are just gay/feminine. That's just how some guys are, and there's nothing wrong with that. Your lack of social enterprises in early life may have skewed not only your social interaction, but how you interact with yourself. When by yourself, you probably don't notice your personality, but with others, it's easier to compare yourself. It isn't a flaw so much as a personality trait that sort of went neglected for awhile.
Thanks for sharing your story. I think that although you say you're confused, you actually have some clear ideas about what you want: If you don't want to do IT for a living, why not look for a different course instead of studying IT for three more years? Is that possible? You could even have a gap year while you figure out what you want. It's not possible to change your whole life immediately, because people become stuck in their habits. Choose one small thing that you would like to change and start with that. When you feel like the change has become a natural part of your life, choose something else to do next. Maybe taking up a new hobby seeing as you are determined to get away from the internet, or maybe something smaller like having an evening off the computer once a week (if you still use it a lot) and doing something else instead. Have goals, but don't be hard on yourself if you struggle with them, just keep picking yourself back up and carrying on. Good luck ---------- Post added 18th Sep 2013 at 08:41 PM ---------- PS. As for the gay thing, you don't need to label yourself, especially if you're not sure. But I do know that I have resisted labeling myself as bi for a long time because I kept thinking, "I know I enjoyed getting off with that woman, but maybe it was just a once off", "I know I fantasize about women, but maybe it's just fantasy", "I know I want to kiss women, but maybe I'm just experimenting". Now I just think, okay, so there's differences between the way I feel about men and women and I haven't explored them all yet BUT "I fancy men and women, therefore I'm bi." Just my thoughts, what's right for you may be different
