26 and still in the closet :(

Hi

I'm a 26 yo gay guy. I've really needed some advice on my life for a while now. I have no one I can talk to openly and am starved of any kind of honest interaction.

I've known I was gay since I was 9 or 10 but I still havn't told my family. My school friends still don't know. I came out to the people I met when I went travelling when I was 18, and I told my university friends, but I moved back home 3 years ago and have lost contact with all of them. I've become very isolated and anxious and I feel like I am throwing my life away.

I first came out when I was 13, to my best friend. We had been inseparable from the first day of school, and he had always felt like a member of my family. The friendship was always completely innocent and platonic, and we were very happy kids, constantly joking and going on adventures. I knew that I was gay and I remember spending months building up the courage to tell him, because I needed to tell someone. I finally did it by writing it on a scrap of toilet paper and stuffing into his hand, then running out of the room. I came back a few minutes later and he was totally cool with it. The next few months were great and I felt totally liberated because I could finally talk with someone honestly, and start to develop as a person and really find myself.

However, thats not how it turned out. I can't remember exactly when or why things changed, but after about 6 months he seemed to 'forget' that I was gay and started encouraging me to get a girlfriend. Obviously my older self in that situation would have just said 'Erm, didn't you hear me say I was gay?' , but I was a vulnerable and impressionable kid. I went along with it, and after a lot of peer pressure in school (I didn't come out to my school friends), I started dating this girl in my class. She was really nice and pretty, but the month the 'relationship' lasted was like a long waking nightmare. I knew it was completely fake from the start, but I had to keep up a charade of kisses and holding hands. I hated having to do it, because it felt physically disgusting for me. I'm still haunted by it. Eventually I broke up with her over the phone. She was strangely ok with it, which confused me because I'd been pretty sure she was in love with me (she constantly said it). The massive twist is that a few years later I found out she was LESBIAN! She must have been in exactly the same situation as me, pressured by her girl mates to have a boyfriend. I just couldn't believe it when I found out, and I think if only I had had the courage to tell her the truth, she probably would have come out as well and we could have become actual friends. Unfortunately school when your 14 is a den of snakes and I was a nice looking and popular guy who had a few admirers. I had to choose between faking a relationship or explaining why I wasn't interested, and I chose to lie. I feel like it was the fateful decision of my life, but I also feel like it was influenced by the way my best friend mindf****d me after I came out.

After I ended the showmance I became increasingly quieter and withdrawn. I think I was deliberately trying to make myself smaller and more boring, to stop girls from liking me so I wouldn't be put in that situation again. I felt like there was no way I could possibly come out in school, because everyone would realise that I'd faked a relationship. I must have been so confused and isolated. By that point I was drifting apart from my best friend who had fallen in love with his girlfriend, and he had fully rolled back everything I'd ever said to him and was acting as if I were straight. I remember going to parties with him and him asking me which girls I wanted to 'pull'. I think it really messed with my head.

About 3 months after I ended the fake relationship, my father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given 2 years to live. My father was was a handsome, successful, loving, intelligent, deep-thinking and very popular man. He had been feeling a bit odd for a while, and the day before we were supposed to jet off for a 3 week adventure across California, he went to the hospital for a brain scan. They found a shadow and we had to cancel the holiday. I remember just cyring uncontrollably for days, and then feeling numb. He deteriorated rapidly and died about 11 months later at home at the age of 50. I didn't cry at his funeral, because I just felt completely empty and unable to comprehend what had happened. The visit to the morgue to see his corpse will haunt me forever and I have no idea why my mother thought it would be a good idea.

After that my life started to go off the rails. I still wasn't out at school and felt like I was too busy worrying about that every day to begin mourning my father. It was just me at home with my mother and she was going a bit crazy. I found a new group of stoner friends and started smoking a lot of cannabis. I think one of the main reasons I started smoking it was literally because it was something to talk about which wasn't sex. I didn't want to lie and pretend to be straight, so I just became kind of nothing, like asexual. I couldn't last long in any normal 16 year old group without having to open up, so I joined the stoner group so I could lounge around talking about weed, giggling about stupid stuff and just being silly. I think I just wanted to block everything out and not think about anything. I was always a bright spark at school but in 6th form (last 2 years of school) I started to get a bad attitude and a reputation for being thrown out of the class, and never doing homework on time. This wasn't like me and I was just acting out. Even my favourite teacher, who I had a real connection with and was almost like a father figure, seemed to have cooled towards me by the end of school.

After school ended I decided to go on a gap year with my friends. We spent ages planning it, then a couple of months before we were due to go I backed out and decided to do a volunteer program by myself. I realised that I would have a miserable time spending six months with people who didn't know I was gay, and I would have to tell them. I bottled it. In hindsight this was such a ridiculous decision, because they would have loved it if I came out and probably already knew I was gay. So I went on a volunteer program in February 2008 and loved it. I got on with everyone and it was just really exciting. We were a few days into this jungle trek when my best girl mate asked me simply 'are you gay?' I said 'possibly' and then just came out with it. I felt so euphoric to finally talk about it, like I'd just exploded out of a prison cell. It was the first time I'd spoken to anyone about my true self since I was 14, and I'd been living inside my head in turmoil the whole time.

I spent the next 6 months travelling around Asia and meeting lots of people and it was a great, liberating experience. Unfortunately I didn't find what I really wanted, a boyfriend. I had never kissed or had a sexual encounter with a guy, and I was unbelievably horny and surrounded by attractive guys in swimwear. I actually went the whole time without any kind of encounter with a guy, even though there was a constant shagfest going on around me at all times. By the end of the 7 months I was starting to feel deeply depressed and lost. I realise now that during my years of isolation I had missed out on all the formative experiences which make people who they are. I had never felt intimacy from a guy or had any sexual feeling reciprocated. My only experience with intimacy was a traumatic memory of my fake relationship when I was 14. My subconcious shame of this meant I'd become a deeply buried person, and had a very fragile veneer of confidence and worldliness, when inside I was still like a child. It stopped me from ever really opening up to anyone, even when people knew I was gay. I had no idea how to get what I wanted and no chance of getting any honest advice, because I lied to everyone about my lack of real sexual experience. I spent the last two weeks by myself in Thailand and just spent the whole time in my hotel room, feeling completely vacant, smoking weed by myself.

It was nice to come home but I was thrown back into the closet and couldn't explain to anyone what I'd gone through. I still couldn't come out to my home people so I just said 'it was great' and resumed my old pattern of vagueness and lying by omission. By this point they must have realised something was up and my situation was becoming a massive elephant in the room. It was awkward, but I went to university in the autumn and immediately told everyone there that I was gay. I felt really optimistic and thought that this would be the time I had always dreamed about. In my second term I hooked up with a guy for the first time. He was literally the hottest openly bi guy in the whole year. He was everything I had always fantasized about. The first time I met him on an LGBT night he just stared at me like he'd never seen anyone like me before. He said that I was exactly what he'd been looking for. There was also a less hot guy there and they were both competing over me. A week or so later he invited me to his halls. We sat on the bed and watched movies. I literally sat there frozen the whole time. I have no idea what was going through my head, but I was sat next to the guy of my dreams, potentially about to have sex, and I didn't know what to do. I literally didn't know what you were supposed to do in this situation. I should have been honest about my lack of experience, but I just couldn't move for some reason. I left at about 6am having spent the whole night watching films. It was so humiliating, because he just looked annoyed and baffled.

The next week, he invited himself round to my halls. Again we watched movies for a few hours, and I was still completely frozen. At some point he started playing with my hand. I remember gradually holding his hand, and then him slowly starting to touch my arm. Eventually we kissed and basically did everything except anal sex. I foolishly said I didn't want to have sex. I was worried that it would hurt, and didn't want to do everything at once. It was fun, but I was so nervous. I couldn't hold an erection and he eventually just kneeled over me and jizzed all over my chest. I felt so incredibly pathetic. I'd been pretending to be clued up for years and this guy had just looked deep into my soul, seen my childish innocence, and then jizzed over me like was a piece of dirt. That was literally the first and last real sexual experience I've ever had, and it was 7 years ago.

His best gay mate also had a thing for me, and for some stupid reason I told him that I had hooked up with him (the hot one). The hot one then called me up the next day angrily. I was so clueless about romantic situations that it hadn't occurred to me that me telling a guy who liked me that I had hooked up with his mate would cause a rift, so I was very blase and casual on the phone. I was such a huge idiot. I came so close to having a real go at a relationship, and I f****d it up. I bumped into the guy I hooked up with occasionally and he would just laugh at me. I felt deeply ashamed and the last time I saw him in the library I didn't even acknowledge his presence, even though he was stood with the person I was talking to. I could feel him intensely staring at me.
By this point I'd started to smoke weed every day. Before, I would smoke it most weeks but never felt the need to always have some. I had a student loan and was starting to feel deeply lonely and isolated again. I got into a pattern of smoking it all day, every day, which I am still in to this day. At uni that wasn't particularly unusual and I was in a kind of stoner crowd anyway, but I didn't stop when I needed to do work, and I didn't have any real fun or excitement in my life. I became less and less outgoing and started to lose touch with all the friends I'd made in first year. I did live with a group of close friends who I had loads of good times with, but I gradually became more and more dependent on weed. I bottled out of my third year and had to retake it, and then didn't turn up to half of my exams in my final year. I ended up scraping a third after some painful negotiations with the course leaders and a counsellor's note. My brothers had always said that I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I was always very academic at school, at least up until my final year. I was so much more interested in school than most pupils, and I seemed to effortlessly get top marks in every subject except PE, so me getting a third was a huge shock to me and my family.

I felt so lost and numb after leaving uni that I just moved back home and carried on smoking weed every day. I didn't even start looking for serious jobs, thinking I couldn't face being around people. I completely cut out my uni friends. They have tried to get into contact with me but I have ignored all of their phonecalls and messages. They probably just think I'm being cold and aloof but in truth I can't handle being around them in my current state. I realised that I'd become a complete loser. Everyone I knew had already been through several relationships and break ups and were done with their formative stage and were moving forward with their lives, getting good jobs. I still felt like I was at square one. I feel like I've experienced about 1% of life, and I'm trapped now by my shame and my lack of adult life experience. I literally spent all of 2015 doing nothing, just sat in my bedroom smoking weed. I havn't had a job since early 2014 and am living on a tiny allowance from the family property company, which I am lucky to have. I'm realising how bad this is as I'm writing it, and I can't believe it has gone on for so long.

I did get a great job by a fluke of luck a couple of weeks ago, even though its unpaid at the moment. The problem is, I'm working with two of my old school friends who still don't know that I'm gay, although they must suspect it. I like everyone else there (team of 8) but I'm anxious and insecure, and feel like everyone can see through my veneer of normalness. I did quit cigarettes last week though, and that is a big deal for me. I don't think I have gone for a day without a cigarette for possibly 5 years, and I thought that I would never be able to quit. For some reason I can just feel this huge wave of positivity building within me. I am 27 in July and I want to make 2016 the year I turn my life around. I havn't quit weed yet but I feel like I am getting closer to being ready. I just don't want to fail and fall back into depression and apathy. Once I quit, it had to be a one way street. I need to get a good paid job, move out of my mum's house, start going to the gym, get healthy and most importantly find someone who loves me. What I would like to know is, could anyone love me if I told them my whole story? What do I do if I meet the man of my dreams? Do I tell him everything and hope for the best, or do I just pretend I know what I'm doing and hope I don't freeze up again? I've chatted to a lot of guys on dating sites and apps but am just too shy and anxious to meet up with them in person. I have lost all the friends who knew I was gay, and have to do this on my own.
If anyone is still reading, thank you so much for reading my life story and sticking with it. I would love to hear any thoughts or advice you might have. Please be as honest and brutal as possible, after all this time the last thing I need is to be comforted or humoured. I feel like a need some real wisdom.

Thank you!