If asked what my dream house would look like, one of the very basic requirements it would have would be a huge walk-in closet. I love to organize and I like every piece of clothing, purses, scarves and shoes to have their very own cubbies. My last house in Virginia had such a closet. It had space for hanging clothes, shelves to hold clothes, a storage area off of that, area plus more hanging space for clothes. It was that area that I turned into a small private office. That was some closet! I loved hanging out in there. What privacy and solitude.
Up to that point in my life, I thought of closets as places to store things in and not a place to come out of. But come out I did….because at age 49, I realized I was gay and had been all of my life. It was a real shock to me since I had been dating men since I was 19. Plus, I had two ex-husbands and was married at the time to future ex-husband number three.
Let me tell you, coming out in Northern Virginia was quite an experience. I had people tell me it was a phase that I would soon tire of and that I was acting out to get attention. And the way they described my coming out was, “Sharon? She changed horses in mid-stream,” or “ Sharon ’s going through a mid-life crisis, probably due to menopause.” Oh please! What can’t be blamed on menopause?
The reason I came out was because I finally met a person who treated me as the wonderful, loving, funny, attractive, creative creature that I am. She didn’t try to mold me into someone I wasn’t and she understood what made me tick. The men in my life were always demanding me to be someone I wasn’t. To them I wasn’t thin enough, pretty enough, not well educated nor well-behaved enough and so forth. Also, I did not have breasts large enough for their liking! All I ever wanted from a man was to be appreciated for who I was and not for what they demanded me to be.
During my years married to men, I read a lot of romantic novels to keep me content and in my place. The plot line was always the same: the heroine would find a man who immensely annoyed her, but due to a maze of inspired-by-evil events, he rescues her. At the end of the story, he becomes her prince charming and they live happily ever after. Unfortunately, in real life, as we all know, it isn’t that simple. After four marriages (I married the first guy twice) you would have thought I would’ve figured out there was a problem. The problem was….I was gay and I couldn’t be someone I wasn’t and never would be. Once I had that epiphany, my life changed for the better.
Being a Lesbian at any age isn’t easy nor is it without its trauma-filled moments. Try getting a divorce in a white, male, Republican, Southern Baptist state because you are no longer interested in the male sex. A big oops! One finds out very quickly who really are the open-minded liberals among us and also, the ones who pretend to be….and never were. Another one of life’s lessons learned, that after years of filling up one’s closet with stuff so that you can hide from the world about who you really are, it gets so crowded in there that you have to come out, just to be able to breathe and be your true self!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment