Being Outed to Old Friends, Still a Difficult Experience

I still am not posting very often. I attribute this to my slow progression toward opening up my bi side. I am comfortable with being open to myself, and I am enjoying myself as the situations arise. However, I've still been self conscious about coming out and being open to some of my oldest friends. I say that mostly because they were all raised the same way as me, and we were all raised to be quite homophobic growing up. Maybe I shouldn't care at all, but for some reason the idea of all my old friends talking about how I "turned gay", as they would see it (plus, I'm sure that most of them don't see the distinction between gay and bi) does not feel good. Like I said, I know that I shouldn't care, but I have enough to deal with right now without hearing all my old friends saying who-knows-what about me.

Anyway, I knew this type of thing would eventually happen. After all, I changed my facebook profile from being interested in women, to interested in men & women last year. You know, I think that I stared at the "save profile settings" button for a while after I did that, before I went through with it and clicked it. I knew at that moment that I would have to be open about who I was, because eventually people would notice that little word "men" on my profile and start to talk, and possibly ask questions. Also, I'm sure that I made that change in the first place to force myself to be open about who I was. I've been ready to be open and out after all, but I knew that breaking through that wall would still be hard.

Well, that first experience of the wall to break through (I've been open to some of my newest friends, but only a couple, and it's my old friends and family from the past that I am talking about when I talk about breaking through that wall of being comfortable with being open) happened today. I got a call from one of my oldest friends, my best friend growing up, that I haven't talked to much in years. He'd been out of the country working for a bit and was back in our old hometown, making calls to catch up with our old group of friends. We chatted about what I've been doing with my life, my current point in college, and what he'd been doing with his life, etc., ya know, shootin the shit. Anyway, after talking for 20 minutes or so, out of the blue he just says "dude, are you gay?". I felt quite blindsided and thrown off to say the least. Needless to say, I just laughed a bit and said "ha ha ha, why would you think I'm gay?". In that half a second, my nervousness shot through the fucking ceiling, I new the cat was out of the bag, and I thought about all the things that might have been said about me for him to ask a thing like that. He then informed me that someone had said that I was gay or bi, then he mentioned being told that someone saw on my facebook that it said that I like men and women. I didn't shy away from the question, whether I wanted to or not. I said "yes, I'm bi". We went round and round for a bit where he said things like, "so you're gay?", and I said "no, I'm bisexual, there's a difference, I do like girls, I just like some guys too". He did say that he was suprised, because we were close friends for so long, and he never thought that I was gay, etc, which brought the whole conversation round in circles again as you could imagine.

Overall, eventually the conversation led back to my friend saying that it's cool, and he shouldn't judge me or anyone else for what they do. Also him saying that it's all cool and he should come down to my town and hang out some time. I was happy to be off the bisexual subject, happy to have the talk over with, and happy that, overall it went better than I expected. I was nervous and freaked out to have to break through that wall with an old friend, and I don't doubt that more of my old group of friends will be aware of everything now. I'm glad to get it out there for the most part, and I know that being open about that side of who I am will get easier after this encounter.

It's weird though. Even though things went alright, I still have this freaked out feeling, and the same nervousness has lingered throughout the rest of the day. It seems silly that I let it bother me so much, and maybe it is. But that's how I feel, and I just figured that writing about it would help. And, to anyone that reads this, thanks for listening...