NEED ADVICE!! Coming out.

This is going to be slightly more complicated then your standard coming out story, which I really would like to do, so please stay with me while I explain everything the best I can.

So I'm bi, but I'm way more into guys, its just that the fact that I've fallen in love with girls made things extremely confusing for me when it came to my orientation. The way I was told was that you were gay, which was fine, or you were straight, which meant you were normal. I was neither so It took a long time to come to where I'm at.

Now comes the complicated part. See around my junior year of high school my parents decided they wanted to send me away to boarding school. My mother has these issues with mood swings were in one situation she is fine, and then the next day same situation and she freaks the fuck out. I was avoiding as much contact as was humanly possible when you live in the same house with somebody, but apparently this constituted "aggressing" against her, because she does not have mood swings, and thus I did not deserve to be in the house. My life was fine outside of the house and people really relied on me, leaving was a deep betrayal of sorts; I did not want to go. I wasn't on drugs, my grades were ok and I had friends that I loved.

My Parents convinced me by spending about four month, though it felt longer, telling me how much I was a failure, all my personal flaws, and screaming at me daily. Sometimes I had to wait until the early morning to go and get food, and twice I had to barricade my room because my parents got so out of control emotionally I no longer felt safe physically. The point is the never hit me, like we say in guantanamo emotional abuse in our society is not even close to being the same as physical. Nobody listened but my friends, and who’s going to take the side of a teenager against his parents? Anyways I eventually broke.

I didn't choose the school; it was a prep school in Massachusetts heavily devoted to the sports. I tried to make the best of it, but boarding schools are a bit like really beautiful prisons. I really don't want to go into it but this was the worst time in my life. I felt like dying a lot, but I thought of my friends back home and how selfish that would be to die. As for my sexuality things were so fucked up in my life I told myself that I would put figuring that stuff out until later. It seemed like a sick joke that on top of everything that was going on in my life I was also gay, young and at a school full of jocks.

After that year, which was a disaster on all fronts, my parents let me go to a school that I chose. Oh, by the way I had to repeat a grade to get accepted to the first school. I went to a hippish school. It was nice. I was still broken and depressed as fuck, but it was a good place to be. I smoke a lot of pot in the forest, did a lot of photography and fell in love the Stencil Artist Banksy. I really wanted to do street art, but I applied to school back in the shitty boarding school, all rigorously academic, fast track to graduate school, small towns with no street on which to do art.

Now between rigorous academics and street art guess which thing my parents found more important? So I headed off to college. Now remember this is the third place I've moved to in three years after having the same friends since the 4th grade. Rigorous academics? No. Substance abuse? Hell yes. Street art? No streets to art on. Creativity of any kind? I started making digital music using the same concepts I learned from stencils. Without it I probably would have went insane.

At this time I took the time to figure out the whole being gay thing. So yes I can be attracted to women, not just women in general, but specific women that I find attractive, but for the most part, as in the vast majority of the time, I'm into guys. Nice to figure this out, nice to tell people. Did not tell my parents. Not that I think they'd disapprove, just that I have no trust in them what so ever. Most everything I tell them is eventually used against me in someway. I do not tell them where I'm going when I leave the house, even if it is a boring errand, I did not tell them about my orientation.

Anyways, high academics did not work out, and at this point my parents were tired with dealing with me. My mother is on some kind of medication now, which she hides from me, because, you know, I'm the one with all the problems, not her. So I was back home, and largely being ignored. Freak-outs were still happening but less so, and less about me. I was still mixed up at that point. I burned a lot of bridges with friends, my heavy drinking at the time contributed to that. I pretty much stayed in the basement making music, which I cannot express to you how much that helped.

Now it’s been two years and I'm doing significantly better. I've stopped drinking every night just to pass out. I never had an addictive personality to begin with and once the pain started lifting it was easy. I mean the pains still there, and will always be there, but it less then it was.

The problem is that now I'm 22, in the closet, college drops out, living at home with no friends. As you can imagine I'm trying to move on with my life. Part of the problem that got me into the mess is that my parent never let me have ownership of my life. Of all the major decision in my life over the past five years my input has been less than appreciable. They have this idea of who I am, mind you starting well before I was down and out that was less than positive and they thought based off of this idea that they knew what was best for me. I feel like this negative view of me becomes a full-filling prophecy for them, that often they seem to, unconsciously, go out of their way to throw a wrench in me moving forward, and that each time they do this it reinforces their negative views. Like they keep telling me how its my life, and how they don't care about how I run it, but they still know what's best better than me, so each time I take steps toward Drew, my name is Drew by the way, the gay artist, the person I can't help but being, that is not acceptable.

I want to come out, but in a way that frees things up a little, makes my parents realize that they don't have everything figured out for me. Given the family history, how do I come out in a way that causes contemplation and challenges their long held beliefs? I want to move out, get a boyfriend and pursue a wholly unproductive, un-utilitarian thing like music along with a shit job?

Also of note my mother's brother is manic depressive, notice how mental illness runs in our family, and made nothing of his life. Often she talks to me in a way were she's really talking to her brother, like I've heard her say the same thing to him.

 

You’re right to think that I’m still pretty raw. These are people who hurt me big. They’ve never admitted any culpability or apologized in the least. They are still quite capable of screwing up my life as bad as they did and that thought terrifies me.

Coming out for the sake of coming out, that’s something I need to do to move forward and their not homophobic. You have no idea how awful it feels joking with my racist, Rush Limbaugh loving grandpa about girls every time I talk to him, something that definitely needs to stop. However making myself that emotionally vulnerable to them; if there’s one thing I’ve learned with my parents is that if I stick my head up I’m just exposing neck. I just don’t have the strength for that.

I remember when I was way younger, my mom was redecorating my room and I was lucky enough to pick the paint color. That choice consisted of five shades of off white. Now I’m not the type of person for mauve, none of the choices worked for me as a person, but we’re talking about paint, what a room is colored doesn’t matter much. The point I’m making is that this mentality pervades the majority of interactions I have with them. I’m given all the wide, open, free choices in the world as long as they conform to a pre-selected, narrow list of options. This has not gone away as I’ve progressed into adulthood.

The problem is that moving forward I’m going to be making choices about my life that are right for me, but run up against the hard and fast constrictures of my parents, people, let me remind you, who’ve spent a great deal of time learning how to hurt me a lot.

There’s this aspect to the narrow choices that I haven’t covered yet. Its not like she thinks the choices fit me as a person. She knows that I’m different, but she hates who I am. The choices are a way of making me more “normal”.

I’m sure now you can see how my coming out has a lot to do with the general issues I have with my parents. A coming out for the sake of coming out? Not going to happen in my lifetime. A coming out that connects to wider issues of general acceptance of me as a whole person, not just my sexuality, the idea that conventional normalcy is beyond an unrealistic idea, and that my parents just don’t know a whole lot about me to make any decisions about my life that will work? That’s the conversation I need to have.

What do you think? I’m worried that coming out, then introducing such a shift to their thinking will be too much to absorb, or it could be just the shock necessary to open up their mind to other possibilities. Also there is the fact that I’m the only grandson on my mother’s side of the family, thank god for my cousin on my father’s side. The subject of children of my own has never really come up, but I’m just not sure how they are going to take that I’m not going to be a breeder.

Basically I kind of need my parent’s approval to move forward, not because I desperately need their love and support, not going to happen with them, but I need it as a guarantee that they won’t come in and fuck up my life as they’ve done in the past. Coming out can be a broader form of empowerment to me as a whole person and the worst that can happen is that I'm out.