#outted

I recently revisited something I thought I had rehashed and accepted in the past for a long while. Now I have realized I convinced myself I was over it because that was what was expected of me. I joke about it like it's a funny thing, but I was never allocated the time to actually process what had happened in the first place.

I was outted by a person very close to me. All of the media at the time presented coming out as such a monumental painful changing thing to put onto others. In short, it felt it was always portrayed as something burdensome and I interpreted that as the time as a unnecessary burden that needs not to be shared/put onto others.

Coming out is up to you whether you want to do so, how, when, where, ALL of it should be in your hands and how you'd like to go about it if at all.

I was stripped of that choice.

I intended to never tell them because I knew that if I had my parents would always used it as a point to indicate they're good parents as well as used to invalidate how I'd like to improve our relationship stating things along the lines of "We're not so bad, other kids don't have accepting parents." Which they did and still do to this day.

My work was doing a raffle give away for the entire store (Pre-covid, don't worry.) Because there are over 100 employees, a simple scrap of paper in a hat wouldn't do. Management had set up a program that took names from the store employee list and pulled a name at random. Unfortunately for me, that list used my legal name... and my name hadn't been changed legally.

You can probably see where this is going.

As "luck" would have it, my (dead) name was picked and shouted out for the entire store to hear. Everyone got really quiet and I heard a couple people whispering, "Who's that?" and, "That last name, that sounds kinda familiar..."

I sat there stone-faced, fingers digging into the armrest of the chair I was sitting in, just willing them to set the prize to the side and continue on with the raffle.

Then, I see someone in management's eyes light up and say, "Oh! I know who this is!" and started walking towards me. I'm still panicking and frankly unable to move; when he hands it to me I can't even make eye contact, so he just sets it on my lap.

Everyone is buzzing now, and I feel like I'm having a heart attack, so I wobbly get up to walk to the restroom. Away from everyone else, I stopped in the hallway between the two bathrooms and just broke down. I felt like I didn't deserve to go in either, and it was all the more humiliating.

Getting not only outed but dead named at the same time, and on such a large scale, is so, so scary. You don't know who there is supportive or who there wants to kill you. Maybe someone's thought about you, now thinks you've tricked them personally, and is on the defensive about their sexuality. Maybe not, but you never know! Not to mention the wave of incoming inappropriate questions too soon come your way.

Dirk: Which- one of us are you referring to?