How The Pandemic Helped Me Finally Come Out

What better way is there to tell a coming-of-age story than with a ‘coming out’ story?

Well, to set the scene, this all took place at a time in my life that was perhaps a little later than the average coming out story - I was 22 when it happened. I'd been putting it off for years, and while I'd had the courage to talk to some of my close friends about it, and what bisexuality actually meant, my family had no idea.

It was late in 2020, I was living in Brisbane, and working as a research assistant while waiting for my next University course to start. I’d been seeing my current partner for about 9 months and things were starting to get quite serious.

It had gotten to the milestone in my first non-hetero relationship where it was 'time to meet the parents', and of course I couldn't really do that without, you know, first explaining to my parents why my partner was a Jason and not a Britney or a Kaylah. In a lot of ways, it felt like I was living on a sinking boat, and I had the choice of either coming out and living a new life, or, staying on the boat and sinking under the weight of the world.

It had been an interesting year already, and at that point I was in the mindset of:

Well, this year has been absolutely wild. There’s a global pandemic, Kobe Bryant has tragically been taken forever and waterfalls are now apparently working in reverse. Might as well come out just to top it off... right?

The only problem was I had no idea how to do it. I’d told my friends, almost a year prior, but my parents didn’t live anywhere close to me so I’d evaded telling them. It wasn’t because I thought they’d react badly, it was just… awkward, and there had been some discussions around LGBTQ+ rights/movements in the household when I was younger that I didn’t particularly agree with. So finding a way to tell them was something I’d been putting off for as long as I could.

The internet was full of hilarious and insightful stories of people coming out, but I hadn't been ready to write that part of my own life's story until now. Now I was stuck trying to figure out how I'd do it.

That is until one day, it hit me: I could talk to my sister about it first, test the waters, and go from there. Kind of like a practice ‘coming out’ for the big thing. That's how I saw it anyway. The idea came about one day when my partner had obtained some e-vouchers for a popular clothing store that my sister happened to be obsessed with. Neither of us wanted the vouchers so I casually sent them on to my sister, while sprinkling in the fact that I’d gotten them from “my partner” to hopefully start up a conversation.

What I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that my sister is a typical off-with-the-fairies, oftentimes socially oblivious engineer who responded to my message with something along the lines of “Wow thanks!” with no further discussion at the time.

I chickened out and didn’t push it any further at that point, and so the conversation kind of ended there. Unfortunately, a few days later, my plan severely backfired.

Disaster struck.

My weekly phone call with the family was strange to say the least. Something was definitely off. I knew almost straight away that my sister had told our parents I was seeing ‘someone’ because they continuously made comments like “it would be nice if you had a plus one to take to that event you’re going to next week” or “will you be bringing anyone home for Christmas this year?” which were things they NEVER asked.

I managed to shrug off, dodge and play dumb for the entire phone call because I just wasn’t ready for the conversation yet. I hadn’t had my practice yet after all. Not long after I had hung up the phone, my sister messaged me, asking about who this mystery person was who had provided the e-vouchers, while also confessing she'd mentioned something about it to my parents.

Finally, she’d taken the bait. I told her immediately and of course, her reaction was incredibly supportive and positive, which I suppose gave me the confidence to then write up a message to send to my parents. I know sending a text message is so much less personal than doing it in person or on the phone, but I was so anxious about it I figured sending a text was better than avoiding it indefinitely. My mother's reaction was also extremely positive and supportive, although, she confessed that neither her or Dad really knew what to say. Apparently they were really shocked but, to be completely honest, I have no idea why either of them were as surprised as they were.

Why? Well, I'm not usually a fan of stereotyping but, if I'm completely blunt about it, there were rather obvious signs when I was younger that perhaps I was going to be bisexual. For example:

I was the kind of kid who would play with dinosaurs and Legos but would also love mixing them in with my sister’s Bratz dolls.

I was obsessed with Shrek (and to be honest still am) and dress-ups, but didn’t care if I played Shrek or Fiona.

My best friend was the tom-boy girl who lived down the road.

I had decided I wanted to be a writer/artist when I grew up.

My playlists consisted of a combination of 70s, 80s and 90s rock (i.e Queen, David Bowie, Blink-182, Green Day), ABBA, and the lovely Katy Perry.

I'm aware that none of these things say much of anything individually, but come on... really? There were so many dead giveaways that surely they would have, at some point, thought that maybe something was up? On the other hand though, perhaps I should applaud them because they didn’t stereotype me. So in that sense, I should say thanks, I guess.

I suppose people only see what they want to see. That, and my parents are generally quite clueless about this kind of stuff given that they (quite literally) live under a rock. I think if I were to have told them I'm part of the LGBT community, rather than being as direct as I was, their minds would've been like:

The Let's Get Beers Today community?

The Lazy Girls and Boys Teaching community?

The Let's Go Buy TJ Maxx (products) community?

Ok, the last one may actually be relatively accurate...

In the aftermath, things actually turned out so much better than I had ever thought possible.

After things settled down a few months later, I went back to visit the family for Christmas and things were surprisingly normal. Well, they were normal after Dad and I had a long deep and meaningful conversation about how guilty he felt for not making it easy to talk to him about it, which inevitably lead to some tears and a long awaited apology hug. But hey, considering it took me 22 years to get to that stage, I think things went back to normal relatively quickly.

It's strange how things like that can control your whole life, and it's not until you rip the Band-Aid off that you wish you'd done it sooner. All that worry, and stress was gone in the briefest of moments (well, mostly). I feel so free now, and I often wonder if I'd ever have had the courage to come out if the crazy things of 2020, like the pandemic, hadn't happened.

So thank you 2020 for being the strangest, most eventful year of my life so far and for putting my situation into perspective. COVID-19 may have forced me to stay in, but at least I finally had the courage to come out - sorry, I had to do it.