Community Rainbow Waves

Pauline, Journey to my true self.

My journey of self acceptance started a long time ago. I was 15 when I suddenly started realizing that I was attracted to both boys and girls, on many different levels. People might think that being born and living in Belgium, it’s easier to accept this part of myself, because LGTBTQ2IA+ have rights here, and in a sense it’s true, but it’s always hard, no matter where you come from.

Growing up, until my 19, I haven’t really seen any positive representation in my personal life, and those 4 years are very important, that’s when you grow the most in my opinion, when you’re supposed to figure out who you want to be. That’s when I started watching what was going on online, in the media. Because I was still questionning myself, a lot. I’d already had strong feelings for another woman and fell in love at that time. This feeling being all new, I was navigating in the unknown. Now I realize that I wasn’t in love with the person but more of the idea if that makes sense ?

But when you’re young and discovering this part of yourself, you dive right in… And along the way you get hurt. I remember being so depressed because, as unhealthy as it was, I needed answers, I was hoping to find them with that woman. Clearly that wasn’t a good idea, you shouldn’t rely on someone to understand you’re trueself.
But then I left for college, and being free and starting over, in a new city.. Going to parties, class, meeting new people and everything that goes with it, kinda opened a new perspective of how I wanted to address this self acceptance, how I wanted to acknowledge it. I had the time I needed, away from what I’ve always known at home.

I was dating a guy at that point, who I was in love with, and I felt safe and had a huge trust in that relationship so at some point, I shared with him that I was bi. And he didn’t take it well, for a few weeks, He was being cold, distant, and kinda offensive towards queer people we saw at parties or at the restaurants.. I never thought he would react like that, clearly I didn’t know him like I thought I did.. I had already grown in the past few months, and I just knew I couldn’t be with someone whou couldn’t accept me, or the community I was part of.

When friends asked me what happened after I told them we broke up, all the anger and disappointment I was feeling just came to the surface. I just told them the truth, just like that. I have really great friends, who are so open-minded and loving, and supportive, they were like “Hell Yeah, So Happy for you”. This break up and my ex behaviour made me realize that actually, I wasn’t the problem. My feelings weren’t the problem at all. But the others who tried to convince me that loving a same sex person was wrong.

From that moment, I just lived my truth. I was getting more informations about representation,what was going on arountd the world about that matter. I was speaking about it to friends, and not being ashamed to say at parties or events “Oooh that girl is beautiful” or “Look at him, so handsome” And I was very comfortable about it. I was dressing up like I wanted too, sometimes it was girly, sometimes boyish. I didn’t care.

And then… I met my first true Love, I was 23. It was at a bachelorette party, and she was my half sister’s best friend ! We automatically got along very well. And I remember having a brilliant time that night, laughing, drinking, talking, dancing. And I never thought, because of previous bad experiences, that she was feeling the same. I knew that she was gay but you know, that doesn’t mean anything. And then on teh wedding day, a few days later, we spent the all day together, always looking for each other when we weren’t together. I had moved to NY and was back for my friend’s wedding so I was leaving a few days later, but we started talking online. And 2 months later, after thousands and thousands of messages, we actually told each other how we were feeling. And we liked each other, a lot, on a profound level. I wasn’t supposed to come back to Belgium for several months, but I did book a ticket to see her, that’s when I knew I needed to come out to my family. I told my cousin, who’s like my sister, and she was so excited for me. Then I told my mom .. And she cried, not because she was disappointed or anything thing, but because I kept all this part of me inside for so long. And then I told my dad, who just said ” Yeah let’s open a bottle of champagne”, and then told to everyone in my family. So it went very well, and deep down I knew they would react like that, but it’s always a challenge to let people know who you truly are.

And 4 years later here I am, living my true authenticity with no shame, being proud of who I am, who I like, being proud to go to parties and flirt with who I want, no matter what people might think.

Pauline

Lesbian

I found out when I was 11 but I guess I always felt like I knew and the first person that I told was my best friend and she has supported me through it since, then I told my mom but she just told me that I was too young and I didn’t know anything but it’s been a couple of years and I’m still the same person I still like girls i just hope she allows me to be me once I tell her again I hope she supports me.

A human grey area

My coming out journey has been closely tied to my mental health and trust me it hasn’t been a linear journey. As a person with borderline personality disorder, I’ve never felt well aligned with anything whether that be my gender, sexuality, or even my own personal identity and it took me 28 years to figure out why.

Throughout my life I have always been uncomfortable with grey area’s they make me feel uncertain and I don’t understand them well; and I struggle with thinking in only black or white. This has caused me to come out numerous times throughout my life by avoiding those grey areas as much as possible. So, growing up in a small rural town where everyone knows everyone made this harder. Exploring my gender and sexuality was (and frankly still is) frowned upon and received a lot of pushback from my community, friends, and family.

First, I was bisexual, then a lesbian, and up until recently a trans man. All never seemed to fit quite how I’d hoped, and honestly, I was avoiding what I already knew.
It took me 28 long years, to finally accept that I’m a nonbinary queer person and that maybe just maybe being a human grey area isn’t such a bad thing.

While coming to terms with this has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, it feels right to acknowledge these parts of myself. I finally feel like I’m honoring who I am and who I love. I’m still working on finding the courage to be out and proud but I feel like this is the best step to take. So regardless of how scared I am, I want to be me, and this is me coming out.

Kier – dreaming Big in Big Sky Country

CONTENT WARNING: THIS COMING OUT STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTION AND/OR DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ABUSE.

I was raised in a very strict, fundamentalist “Christian” cult, so many of my liberal values were viewed as wrong and shameful. My father was bisexual, but he was also very abusive to my mother and I. So my association with any kind of sexual ‘other’ was tied to difficult emotions. I was sexually abused by my father when I was of a tender age and again by a cousin when I was 14, so coming into womanhood and sexual awareness was met by fear and instant repression. I simply shut myself off to the whole experience.
Now, at the ripe old age of 29 😉 I have left the cult, separated myself from abusive family members, and am discovering who I am. It feels so good!
Just since turning 29 in April I have come out as gender queer and am flying the asexual flag (though I may truly be more demisexual). I have never felt so free or so confident.
It has always been easy for me to love others, but I find it’s even easier as I learn to also love myself!
I am inexpressibly thankful for Dominique Provost-Chalkley for her bravery and her representation. Positive representation really does change lives, and sometimes it even saves lives!

A very gay introvert!

I was like 10 or 11 years old when I realized I really like girls, from movies, to tv show even in real life. It was though at first, because I kept denying it that I am not Bisexual, that I am straight. But as time pass by, I accepted myself for who I am. I came out to my friends first, they absolutely knew I was Bi. I then came out to my classmates and the whole school knew it. Some think it was so cool, some didn’t quite like it. When I met my girlfriend (we meet on a dating app ^_^ , I knew it in myself that I really really like her. Like she’s the one for me. I came out to my mom, It wasn’t easy tho. But she did accept me. And my brother is cool with it he doesn’t have any problem me being Bi at all. I am still try my best to come out to the rest of the family. Wish me luck!

Anonymous

i was standing in line at an Amanda Palmer concert, and a female presenting person in front of me made me go: oh. girl-types are pretty too. i havent looked back except to realize how much this reveals about my adolescent interactions with certain girls that i didn’t recognize because they were different than my crushes on boys.

I Have A Girlfriend Now

Hi there, I haven’t come out to any of my family members but I knew I was gay way back when I was in 7th grade. I just wanted to share that I have a girlfriend now, for the first time ever. I couldn’t tell my family for obvious reasons but this community feels like family to me so yeah 🙂

Queer

I knew from a young age I was attracted to boys and girls. I actually had a Backstreet Boys poster and a Brittany Spears poster up in my bedroom and I thought both were cute. I was living in the Midwest at the time and that was a huge no no in the 90’s. Plus I had gotten teased a ton about my mom and stepdad practicing Tibetan Buddhism. I just went along with the other girls gushing about boys, guy celebrities, and such. I had crushes on boys and girls through school, but I felt I wasn’t gay. The only queer women I had been exposed to were very masculine and I didn’t identify in that way. I left home when I was 16 to move to California. I had met my fathers family for the first time and wanted to get to know them. I got involved in their religion, and while I saw the good, I saw so much of what didn’t align with my true self. I struggled for a few more years. I had a few friends come out to me and I was so happy for them. I knew at this point I was queer, I just couldn’t muster up the strength to come out myself.
I eventually moved to Orange County to reunite with my sister and my mom in 2014. I was 23. My mom always knew and kept trying to practically pull me out of the closet, fear had kept me in and so resistant. Eventually my anxiety for not being myself grew unbearable and I had to change that. So I came out at 23. My family was over the moon. Things started shifting for me. My dads family didn’t talk to me for a long time. Things have changed now, we communicate here and there. After my first serious relationship I have found myself in Massachusetts. While my partner and I went our separate ways for personal growth I find myself drawn to help others in situations like me. Be a light in dark times. That along with a spiritual awakening has held me steadfast my efforts and so inline with myself. I genuinely have love and compassion for others and I’m happy to be me. It’s also motivated me to become vegan and environmentally conscious.
So coming out started this beautiful chain reaction for me and I hope to support and encourage others to do the same.
You all are beautiful beings. Let your light shine bright, you are worth it and you never know when that light shines for others in the dark.

Bruna

Hey guys, my name is Bruna, I’m Brazilian. Probably some things I’m going to write can get a little confusing because as my English is a beginner, I will write in my language and my friend google will help me with the translation.
I need to start by saying that my story is a cliché, I usually refer to it that way. But I think the good thing about clichés is that they reach people with a lot of truth, because it’s also the story of a lot of people. So come on.
I am the daughter of separated parents and grew up in a poor community in northeastern Brazil. My parents split up when I was months old and my mother ended up raising me without my father’s help. I lived until my adolescence at my maternal grandmother’s house together with my mother and an uncle. And after that my mother had a partner with whom we went to live for a few years.
It started when I started walking. My mom says that when I started taking my first steps I started going to church. At less than two years old I started going to church. I just went in there and sat down, nobody took me. Even my mother, my grandmother and my uncle I lived with, nobody went to church and in fact they didn’t even like it very much. As it is very hot here most of the year, I would leave the house wearing panties and flip-flops and enter the church at any time, all that was needed was for the door to be open.
The first person I attracted me romantically was my Bible school teacher, I must have been about 8 years old. I didn’t know what I called that feeling, I just know that I wanted to be close to her, touch her, watch her and try to somehow look like her or imitate her in some things. In parallel, I was absorbing and learning about sin, guilt and hell. As I grew up, both things became part of me, and as a teenager I had my affective experiences, both with boys and girls. And then at that time I stopped attending church.
From there, I started to get interested and research about possible theories and explanations to understand this concept so complex that it is sexuality. I consumed materials from both psychological science, biology and the animal kingdom as well as theories of the Christian segment. Despite feeling trapped and suffocated in that search, I really believed in God and wanted to find positive answers in all of that.
When I turned 18 I went back to church, got baptized and tried my best to get close to God. I started to be part of that community. I joined the music and communication group, made myself available to help with various activities, dedicated a part of my salary to deliver to the church every month and help with other campaigns. Sometimes I arrived before the doorman and left with him. I read the Bible a lot, the most complex and contradictory texts, I searched for the original language to understand the most accurate possible translation, I bought several study bibles and biblical dictionaries, I read books and everything else you can imagine.
In parallel to that, at the age of 20 I entered the faculty of Psychology, and then I thought: now I will learn and discover many things about the human being, his interactions and his behavior. So I will seek to study and learn about God in the same way, in an attempt to balance things out.
But, before talking about everything I lived and learned in college, I need to talk about my faith. I really believed in God. I really enjoyed being part of the church and belonging to a community. I learned many good things there and many of the things I learned with faith helped me to become what I am today and of whom I am very proud. A lot of that universe is really part of me. I met people that I can say that made a lot of difference in my life and helped me when I had several problems and difficulties, and who are by my side today.
Despite these things that I see as positive, there were so many others that hurt me too much. There were so many jokes, comments … I saw people being removed and expelled from their activities and positions in the church because of their sexuality. People who had to undergo various rituals and procedures of deprivation of so many things so that they could participate again. I was really reflective on how this topic was always prominent in the church. I heard several messages about it, so many damn jokes that even today I can clearly hear the pastor’s voice in my head with so much irony. It hurt, it really hurt.
I started to think about these parallel universes that may exist, like the one in the church, that managed to make me feel small and insignificant, because it seemed that I couldn’t be part of it, even though it seemed to be a very big place, it didn’t have a little space for me. Maybe this sounds familiar. This environment, ideas can even look like something very sophisticated and sometimes I thought that there was only this universe and that I needed to fit in some way, because it was the only one I could see.
Unfortunately environments, like churches, companies and even the family can compose an environment that is not good for us and then we need to find ours, because trying to fit in can hurt us and collaborate so that we become someone else or the worst, let to be who we are. And if there is no such place, we may need to create one. I will not lie, it is not easy. But we can find people and many other resources to help us. I found many things, I will tell you.
So in college, as you might imagine, it was a long way, from learning, acquiring repertoires about various ways of existing and living. I developed the ability to listen and observe and so many others that promote health and well-being. In my profession I learned about welcoming, understanding and caring. I realized that feelings like guilt and all the actions that can increase this feeling lead to psychic discomfort, mental disorders like depression and even suicide. I learned about relationships and so many other contributions that helped me understand social movements and other such interactions. I learned that the human being is powerful and that there is a potential for transformation. I learned concepts like equity, empowerment, autonomy, and that these being present in the logic of social interaction
can bring so much freedom and quality of life to people and result in changing paradigms and transforming worlds. Ah, I learned a lot that made me and still has made me more human, too human.
At the same time that I was learning so many things about what was human and what makes us human, I was looking for God. I searched, searched and searched. I looked in the bible, in the church, in retreats, camps and vigils but I didn’t find Him in any of these places. And then I started to arrive at the following conclusion: that the relationship with the divine is something so personal that it is certainly within us. I started to search within myself for the relationship I was looking for and approached an idea of ​​spiritual independence. Gradually and with a lot of reflection, therapy and self-care I have sought to improve myself as a person and in my relationships and to reformulate my faith.
But it is in fact a conflict. A conflict occurs when two opposing forces point in the same direction, such as: I have a desire for women, being a woman at the same time that I do everything to make sure that doesn’t happen, because I believe I can’t or that it’s wrong. It’s confusing and it hurts a lot, I know. This can be a sexual conflict, and there are still many others. But we can overcome them.
I learned and I am still learning that life is almost never a dichotomy, it is almost never right and wrong, good or bad, black and white, it is diverse, it is colorful and it is infinite. I usually say that since there are more than 7 billion people in the world, there must certainly be more than 7 billion possibilities and ways of being, of existing and of loving. Among so many possibilities, we don’t have to choose between two. I believe that we will not always need to choose one over the other. It is possible to find a middle ground, a balance. I did not leave my faith to live my sexuality nor the other way around, I am working to find a way to live with both of them because these two instances of life, like so many others, make up who I am and made me get here. We don’t need to deny or renounce who we are since this does not hurt us nor does it hurt others. There are several parallel universes, we will all find one. My faith also consists of this, being part of a possible universe for all forms of existence and it also helps me to produce a sense of life and living.
Now start the process of sharing with my friends about who I am and have already found a community here where I am accepted. Gradually and gradually, in my time I have gone less to the church I have been attending for almost 8 years and integrating into another community. I have been practicing spiritual independence. Also therapy, yoga and many hot baths. My wish is that everyone can find in themselves infinite reasons to be proud and sensitive and positive ways of relating in an identical way, so that from then on they can start transforming the place they live in into a proper environment for our identity and as these relationships and interactions.

Non-Binary

I am 43. I could say my whole story of coming out as a lesbian when I was 16, but that’s not where I want to begin. I am A former songwriter. Made a living. Wasn’t a lot, but it was enough. I had a stroke when I was 40. Had aphasia and memory problems. Then I couldn’t write anymore. I’m still grieving that, but I started painting instead. For the first time. I’ve done quite well with it. I found myself using colors and topics that have to do with who I am. Things I didn’t remember but did remember when I painted them. Like The painting was a vessel for…me to remember who I am. So I decided to come out as non-binary. I’ve always known since I was maybe 4. But there were no words for it. The binary never made sense to me. So here I am. A lovely non-binary human who loves women. And everyone has been so lovely to me. I have learned that there are always consequences to everything you do. Everything. Good. Bad. In between. So you might just be who you are. It’s easier. I hated myself for so long, but now I think I just got lucky.