Hello Everyone

I've been thinking about joining something like this for a very, very long time. But I never could quite work up the courage to do so. Or for that matter, even tell anyone at all what kind of things I've been thinking, ever. Suffice it to say, the Orlando attacks changed that. And not out of ordinary shock and horror at what happened like I usually get over these. This went beyond that for a very specific reason.

A very, very good friend of mine that I've known for several years, who is the first person I've spoken to about..... any of my issues, at all, lives and works in Orlando. His roommate is very, very close friends with four of the victims, three of them being fatalities. One of them, one of the fatalities, being a former intimate partner of that roommate. I know there are two degrees of separation between me and those four people, but it still hit way closer to home than I expected.

I feel really, really bad that I cared so much more about this incident now than previous (appalling large scale of this one notwithstanding), though I'm always heartbroken about these senseless deaths, just because it got closer to me than other attacks managed to. It got me afraid. I might have been there had I lived there. Not necessarily out, but... trying to get more comfortable with myself by just trying to be around, and inspired by others who have already done so. And this guy would have gotten me all the same, outed or not.

I managed to open up to this friend over this, since he needed way more support and hugging for this whole mess than me, and tell him some of the things I've been thinking for as long as I can remember but couldn't quite understand and bring myself to tell anyone anything about.

I'm going leave that here for now and get into my issues I would like help with in support threads. But since I have no experience with how you do things here, I should ask first. I am questioning both my sexuality and gender identity. Would I make just one thread for both or a separate one for each or what?