Coming out to self help!

Hey. I for a long time don't think i knew that i had any feelings for guys. I dated girls and it was ok and even good but there was something missing. I'm 28 now and this was back in high school. I was probably around 20 before i started to realize that i had feelings for guys. Looking back i probably did have those feelings before then but i just ignored it and pushed it away. It wasn't hard to do that because i guess the feelings weren't that strong and i just would never have considered the possibility.

As time went on i guess i did start to have those feelings more but i still didn't pay much attention. Then one night when i was 20 i was riding back from camp one night with my friend and he goes "um i think i like you as more or different than a friend." That was the first time i actually had to deal with it and i wasn't ready. I didn't know what to say but i told him i didn't think i thought of him that way but maybe and i would think about it. The crazy thing was i knew then that i liked him too, but i wasn't ready yet to really accept it. I tried so hard. I would be really nice to him at times and then a real jerk at other times after this. My head was just all over the place and thats how i dealt with it.

It wasn't fair to him at all because he was a great person and i shouldn't have treated him that way. I went up to camp a few weeks later on my own one night and told my friend colin who lived up there that i thought i liked guys and i liked my friend. He took it really well and i felt like such a weight was lifted off me having told someone. He told me that the guy who liked me was a good guy and i should give it a chance. I still wasn't ready and kept treating him poorly and he finally had enough and stopped talking to me and then moved shortly after that. So this doesn't go on forever i'm gonna end it here but this is how i started the process of coming out to myself. Im all good with it now most of the time.

 

Looking back I knew I was into guys probably since I was 10 or so, but I was in denial until I was 19.

Usual things like watching gay porn, looking at guys more than girls and experimenting with other guys should have made it easy to figure out, but in combination with having multiple girlfriends, and having sex and enjoying it made it very confusing for me. Plus denial is a powerful thing. I actually came out as bi to everyone. Right now I usually go by gay because its much easier to explain, but I'm still attracted to some girls. Its weird to explain and I don't even get it myself, but at this point I have learnt to let it go

As for when I got the epiphany that I was into guys, it was probably after I had was sitting next to this openly gay kid in a class. He was nice and cute, and then it hit me that...shit this physical attraction towards guys is more serious that I had thought. I then went into this ridcs phase of talking to as many gay people online as I could get a hand of, read a ton, and then decided that I was bisexual but only attracted to guys in a physical way. At that point kissing, holding hands or being in a relationship with a guy was completely disgusting to me. I would even forward through the kissing in porn because I would find it weird. Again, denial is a powerful thing

And at the very end of my senior year I said fuck it, got my first kiss from the gay kid I mentioned early which then completely verified everything that I had felt and made it clear. Some months later I got a boyfriend, and after finding EC I was able to handle the last bit of shame about my sexuality, and finally be completely okay with it. All of that took me maybe a year after I admitted it to myself?

If you are interested I also wrote a summary of my coming out in one of my blogs on here.

Welcome to EC! And I hope you stick around