It's freeing to be able to [redacted] my Kermit the Frog plushie. To admit that's what I've wanted this whole time. Without the jokes, the charades, the shame. Well.
Still with some shame.
Is this who I truly am? This character? Who wears clown makeup and writes perverted fanfiction about a muppet?
Someone who abandons their family for wild hedonism and pure self expression?
Where's the line? Do I exist in the choices I make, in the father and husband and employee I chose to be? I liked my job. I complained about it, but I was good at it, at one point, and I liked being good at something.
Or am I my most secret and repressed desires? The ones that twist my gut, like the bad parts of a rollercoaster, when I see someone else living how they want to live?
"Join us," they say. Like it's easy. I'm the muppet, sure, but I'm also the muppeteer. The clown, yes, but the man under it as well. I exist in the in between. I think I don't know how to do anything but want.
I want her. I want him. I can't have both. I can't be both, not really. You can either wear a mask or take it off. And the mask is part of me, too.
Maybe it's not so freeing.
