Coming Out of the Closet Without Coming Apart at the Seams

Closet homosexuality.

Sounds like an illness to me!

I was infected by this fear-transmitted disease as a child and the symptoms raged on for nearly ten years. There was no cure at the time and like any virus, it spread to others in my community! At one point, this disease left me and others so ostracized that my closet wasn’t big enough to hold my leprous neighbors and me!

Still, after everyone graduated from my closet, I found a new one in college. There, the closet was much bigger and I almost figured out a way to set up my computer and still organize my clothing. All this in one little living space! I had my food delivered and my clothes sent out for cleaning. I guess that after a while, I stopped caring about the stench coming from the piss bucket in the corner.

I called my closet home.

Hell, as long as you have at least one friend who will keep checking on you from time to time, the closet can begin to feel like a safe house instead of the jailhouse it truly is. 

But eventually, reality catches up with you.  The reality of the closet disease definitely caught up with me!

I don’t know when reality knocked on your door.

Maybe it was when the knock-knock time began. A former closet-dweller heard of your existence and came to your rescue. Or maybe you got sick of seeing sunlight through the panels and you made a flamboyant leap beyond those shadows. Or maybe, right now, the closet cramps your style, and you need to find a way to exist in the real world but you haven’t figured out how to open the door because it’s been jammed shut for so long! 

For me, it was a slow process. I peered out through the cracked doors and looked into a cluttered, dusty, and abandoned room. This room was my soul. Clearly, my soul had been neglected while I was ill, in the closet. My soul was in desperate need for major renovations. 

It’s hard to believe anyone lived in the chaos! When I saw the state of my room, I wanted to run away or even jump back into the closet. Instead, I came out and began to repair and renew my soul.

I came out of my closet. And before I walked out of my room, I did some work--

I found some paper.

And I started writing it all down. 

I was prepared to vent. I sharpened an entire box of pencils and booted the computer. I was going to write until I could not write another word.

It was my story.

I wanted it to be clear and plain. I wanted to reunite myself with the beauty of my original design. Who was I before I became lost in photocopies and blueprints of the many molds into which I would never fit?

I was out of the closet . . . and into the room . . . into my soul. 

I wasn’t going to die of closet homosexuality, but who knew what monsters I would face outside the closet!

I couldn’t keep myself from laughing! 

I couldn’t keep myself from crying! 

Good God!  How would I ever clean up this mess?