They say hindsight is 20/20.

One week ago yesterday marks a pretty significant day in my life. It was the day when I finally decided I really didn't care who knows I'm gay and decided to sort of just announce it on Facebook. I toyed with the idea of even doing that, because honestly, is it something that necessarily needs to be announced? Not really. But I'd been telling one friend here and another friend there for a few months now, and thought the rumor mill may be starting to pick up speed, so I figured I might as well just set the record straight - or gay - once and for all. Which was about damn time, according to some of my friends who were among the first to find out over the summer, but part of me wanted to continue putting it off until, oh, I don't know, the 23rd of Never. 

But I knew I couldn't do that. Not if I ever wanted to truly be happy and live a real, authentic life. And it's not that I'm ashamed to be gay. At least, not anymore. Back in sixth grade, I realized that while all of my friends were developing crushes on boys, I noticed the girls instead, and I kind of didn't know what to do with myself. So many weird changes were going on, as they do at that point in your life, and at first I just thought maybe I wasn't ready to like boys yet? Because that makes so much sense, obviously. I remember feeling the pressure to, though, because even though I felt absolutely nothing for him, I jumped right on the bandwagon for one of the most popular and cutest boys in my grade, and his name was Brett. I wrote his name on all of my notebooks - and well, really, that's as far as it went, because he already had a "girlfriend" - and I made it clear to all of my friends that I thought he was sooo cute. But really, on the inside, I had no idea what all the hype was supposed to be about. Sorry, Brett. Don't worry, it was clearly me, not you.

As middle school progressed, I figured out there was a name for these feelings I had, and I'll admit, I wasn't all that happy when it finally clicked in my little head that I might be different from most other girls in what felt like a pretty fundamental way. I even got a little angry, because I heard how the words "gay" and "lesbo" and "fag" were tossed around by other kids in such a cruel manner, and I didn't want to be ridiculed like that. Middle school was already difficult enough as it was, thank you very much. So I made a conscious effort from that point forward to just try and push these feelings as far down as they would possibly go, hoping they'd just disappear, and ignored them as I entered high school.

Try as I might, every now and then these feelings would surface and cause some turbulence, but all in all, I did a pretty good job of hiding them throughout high school. At least I thought so, anyway. Though I never even dared to think about having a girlfriend, I never had a boyfriend either. But I chalked that up to the fact that I just wasn't pretty enough or thin enough or whatever enough to have one. I told myself if the opportunity ever arose to go on a date with a guy, I'd take it, but (thankfully) one never did. I refused to attend every homecoming and my prom, and avoided anything else that may potentially be awkward to attend without a date, in order to avoid having to feel these feelings I desperately didn't want to feel. But I quickly learned that the older I got, the more difficult it became to ignore how I really felt.

I'm going to pause this little story for a minute to say that I had absolutely no problem with other people who were gay. I truly believed deep in my heart that love was love and gay, straight, bi, whatever - it was totally fine and acceptable and I celebrated that. I literally only seemed to have a problem with it if, and only if, it concerned me. 

I think one of the biggest reasons I didn't want it to be true that I was gay was because I didn't want to disappoint other people. I didn't want to shatter the image of the life I thought my mom had already envisioned for me - a husband, kids, the white picket fence, etc. - and I was so, so afraid that I would lose some of my closest friends if they found out, because sadly, not all of them believed that being gay was okay. And I didn't really have a lot of friends to begin with, so I didn't feel like I could afford to lose any, which means I kept my mouth shut and my feelings suppressed.

Do you know how toxic it is to constantly avoid feeling things, though? High school was a pretty dark time for me because I had a hard time suppressing just my feelings of being gay. I suppressed alllll my negative feelings as much as I could, which caused them to fester and then bubble up to the surface and explode like a volcano once I couldn't keep them in any longer. It was a long, dark, lonely road, and it hurts now to think that it all may have been preventable if I'd just been true to myself from the get-go. 

That's how things continued, more or less, for the next several years. Fast forward to the end of 2014 and that's when things started to change a bit. It was becoming near impossible for me to continue denying the fact that I was gay, and I had started the process of becoming okay with that. It was actually a pretty short process for me. Being gay had become much more socially acceptable, I knew of a few other people who were gay - it no longer felt so abnormal, and so I basically just said to myself, "Well. This is what it is, Becca. It's been ten years (though I can pinpoint things as far back as preschool that may have foreshadowed this) and I doubt your feelings are ever going to change, so you can either choose to accept them and have a chance at a happy, healthy life, or you can continue down this self-destructing path and who knows where you'll end up." I picked option A, and almost like it was magic, I found myself being 100% fine with being gay. 

But then bam, nursing school hit me like a ton of bricks, and that was literally all I could focus on from January until May of 2015. At first I thought that might have been a good thing, but once I took my last final and found myself with overwhelming amounts of free time on my hands, everything came flooding back. I felt like I was about to burst at the seams if I didn't tell someone, anyone, that I was gay. I absolutely could not keep this secret to myself anymore. But of course, it couldn't be that simple. I mean, it should have been. But it wasn't.

I finally told someone for the very first time on June 1st, 2015, and while I felt so much relief...I kind of panicked about it a little too much beforehand, wherein I made a really stupid, impulsive decision. That's another story for a different day, but let's just say it didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped telling someone for the first time would. But from that point forward, it slowly became easier to tell people - and I managed to learn to do it without panicking first! Hooray.

I lost a lot of friends and close relationships over this, but I will never regret being honest about myself with others. I decided that if they have a problem with the gender of the person I may choose to love some day, that's their problem, not mine, and I need to let it go. (Who else now has that song stuck in their head...) And while I did lose friends, I've gained so many more over the last few months who truly accept me for me, and couldn't care less. I am so grateful for them.

Anyway, fast forward to February of this year, and the only person I still needed to tell before officially announcing it to the world was...my mother. Every time I even thought about telling her, I got a knot in my stomach the size of a softball, and it made me feel physically ill. For the longest time I thought that maybe I would just never tell her, but I was tired of feeling like I was lying by omission (so help me if I had to sit through one more award show season and comment on all of the guys on the red carpet), and I felt pretty guilty that a decent amount of my friends already knew, but my own mom didn't. So on February 4th, I typed out a text - yes, I told her through text, because there was a snowball's chance in hell that I would be able to do it in person, don't judge me - kept telling myself that if she loves Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia, that she could still love me (I have weird rationalizations, I know), and pressed send. Annnnd cue the hyperventilation. I couldn't breathe, and began to panic. Shocking, I know.

When I finally received a text back, I couldn't bring myself to open it. I called my best friend Marisa while crying almost hysterically, and she helped me calm down enough so that I could actually read it. And the verdict was...she didn't care. I was no different to her now than I was before, and she still loved me. This got me all worked up again, but this time out of relief. All the years of anxiety and shame flooded out of me, and this weight that I didn't even realize had been sitting there lifted off my shoulders. I finally felt free.

Going back to the very beginning of this post, I don't think I could have predicted how the last decade of my life would have turned out by choosing to ignore an important piece of who I am, but I wholeheartedly believe that the majority of the problems I dealt with in my past could have been avoided if I'd just learned to accept myself about 10 years sooner. But while it makes me sad, I don't regret it. Those experiences shaped me into the person I am today, and I'm confident that they'll serve a purpose somewhere in my future.

I feel like I have a brand new lease on life, and I almost don't even recognize the person I was just weeks ago. Now, I'm not saying things just automatically became 100% better, because that would seem ridiculous and you probably wouldn't believe me even if it were true, but do believe me when I tell you that I am not the same person anymore. I am happier, and the world doesn't feel so dark. There is new hope, and for once, my future looks pretty damn appealing, and I can't wait to see what it has to offer!