Limitations and cognitive dissonance

How limiting what I write about is causing me to not write at all

I’ve been trying to write for the last couple of days. I even started a post about how I felt post-Pride month, but I couldn’t get it to gel into anything that I liked. I think part of it was I tried to write it at 4:30AM before work, but I also just felt like I was piggybacking on every other post-Pride month post I read over the last week. So I decided to try again this morning and see what I could come up with. I have a lot of things percolating as I said in my last post, but they all feel so daunting and deep that I’m afraid to even try.

I feel like I am limiting myself to what I can write about. The funny thing about me is that I long to be heard and understood but a substantial part of me can’t deal with the exposure that is required to do that. I feel like there are topics that are taboo on here because there are people in my real life that read this and I worry how they would react to some of my gay posts or more personal posts. I know that I shouldn’t worry, but I do. But the limitations I’m placing on myself are really making it hard to write. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying - there’s nothing scandalous or seedy that I want to write about. I’m way too boring for that to be the case. Maybe I’m just overthinking it. Given my history, I probably am.

I feel like anything that acknowledges how far back my gayness goes necessarily makes my life a lie and makes me the villain of my own story. Maybe that’s something that I need to work on in therapy. This is probably the time where I need to remember the mantra that I’m going to forgive my past self for not knowing better and doing the best it could with the tools I had at the time. I constantly have to come back around to that because the drum beat of “you were deliberately deceptive for YEARS” is so loud and hard to not believe. I have no evidence to support that the my spouse or my daughter or anyone in my immediate circle believe that, but that part of me that is so unbelievably loud and has definitely consumed the Kool-Aid and beats me over the head with it all the time.

As I’ve probably said in previous posts (or at least alluded to) when I was 23 and probably should have been coming out, I saw no path forward that involved being an out gay man and being happy. Those were mutually exclusive outcomes. I had no role models, I had no one that could counter the internalized homophobia I had. So I closed the gay path down, and then I met a woman and we fell in love and we got married. The fact that I came out as gay 20+ years later and they came out as non-binary at the same time just adds color to our life, right? We should have seen it coming because we ended up getting married on National Coming Out Day (October 11.) It was certainly not intentional - we just wanted a nice, cool autumn day for our wedding. Of course, it was 80+ degrees that day.

I have a lot of cognitive dissonance with being gay. It’s hard to square it with the life I’m living. The place where it’s hardest is at work, where I am not out, but I don’t go to great lengths to hide it either. I think the fact that I’m in a straight presenting relationship throws most people off the scent, but there are days that I want to throw those shackles off and just be ME. We recently hired an out gay man at work and I am old enough to be his father. The ease with which he walks through the world is amazing to me. Now, I am smart enough to know that appearances can be deceiving, but him being gay is a non-issue for everyone in our department. Would it be the same for me? I don’t know. A part of me doesn’t want to risk it because I don’t want to have to explain myself to everyone. A friend told me back before I came out that people should have the chance to know the person we are and be given the opportunity to love that person. I have never forgotten that and it drives a lot of what I do and on the few occasions I have come out explicitly at work to trusted colleagues, the amount of discomfort that I feel is worth the relief of the cognitive dissonance that I felt before the reveal.

Cue the green slime from You Can’t Do That On Television because I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that once I tossed off the limitation of not writing about this, the words flowed pretty easily. So maybe that’s a sign that I should be a little more honest. If people don’t like it or want to hear about, I won’t feel bad if they unsubscribe from this Substack. Because as fun as it is to write about music and movies and the trivialities of my life, I think exploring this in a place that has a bit of accountability is important. I would say I’m sorry for causing people to be uncomfortable but my daughter would call me out for an unnecessary apology and she would be right.

Thank you for reading this and sticking around with me and my erratic posting schedule. I will never turn on paid subscriptions, however, inspired by Haunts You Later, I am thinking of adding a “Buy Me A Coffee” link to the end of every post if people would like to support my writing. I promise that I will spend it wisely. Let’s be honest, it’ll probably be spent on records.