Loud & Proud

From Where I Stand: Loud and Proud by Rebecca Bardoux. Today I got a call from a friend I had not heard from in some time. He told me he came out of the closet.

Today I got a call from a friend I had not heard from in some time. He told me he came out of the closet. I never knew! He always surrounded himself with girls. He said he had those girls around to hide it, so everyone wouldn’t find out he was gay. He also used drugs and alcohol to deal with it. He is clean and sober now. I am super proud of him!

This call was very shocking to me. Here was a guy that was always around girls. He talked like he was getting laid whenever he wanted to. I do remember some of the girls he “dated” telling me he stopped seeing them when they felt things were going great. Overnight he went from loving them to disappearing on them. Now I look back and understand he was getting too close to them and his secret would come out.

I was like that when I was younger. I didn’t want guys to get too close to me either or they would find out the real me. I thought I was a terrible person. This thought process came from low self-esteem and bad parenting. I didn’t have my own identity, so I created lies to make myself look good. To be someone I thought I needed to be for everyone else to like and accept me. That is all behind me now, I have great self-esteem and I know who I am.

Back to my friend, he has spent a good portion of his time on earth living a lie. As time made it harder to deal with it he turned to drugs and alcohol. He told me he could only have sex with a woman if he was high or drunk. That was scary to me since I had been with a couple guys that were the same way.

He was honest enough to tell me he has been with transsexuals a few times. He spent large amounts of money and time on gay webcamming sites. He even got married some years back and had a child. That ended for the same reason all his other relationships did, fear of being found out.

After his divorce he started to get deep into drugs and alcohol and got a few DUI’s. In fact he could have been sent to jail for one of them. He tried a few times to stop drinking and doing drugs, but he couldn’t face himself sober.

What stopped him from living such a painful life was a woman. He didn’t have any sexual relationship with her. She just happens to be someone that saw through him and accepted him for who he was. Funny, that a woman saved his life.

It amazes me that someone would get to the point of almost spending time in prison just so no one would find out they were gay. In the case of my friend, no one would have cared. He would have lived a much happier life and lose so many good friends that cared about him, because of his lies.

Makes me wonder how many people came into my life that hurt me because they were hiding lies. Oh, and the people I hurt by trying to hide my lies. For my friend and me life is so much better living it without lies.

Not everyone is going to like you. I know for a fact when you lie you bring lying people around you. Be honest, honest people around you. Be proud and accept who and what you are. If you don’t the only life you are ruining is your own.