Disclosure Means Good-bye

So Shaft and I are gabbing on the phone while he is on his drive home …

And he asks me what I’m doing this weekend.

Now it’s nice how Shaft asks me, ’cause it’s not accusatory, it’s not inquiring, it’s simply attentive. An interest in my life. So nice. 🙂 And when I answer, it’s no big deal, if I’m doing nothing, I tell him. If I going out, I tell him. If he thinks he needs to tell me to be careful, he tells me. It’s just normal talk. So kewl.

Anyways, this weekend I mention my pretty bland plans, but that I’m going to tell a few more people my specific transition plans, blah, blah, blah.

And he laughs.

“Disclosures are really no big deal now for you, are they?” He says with a chuckle.

“No, they aren’t. I’m just kinda sick of them, it’s pretty much a non-event for me now,” I reply.

“I can tell. You used to get all stressed out thinking about telling anyone, and now it’s like, ‘oh, yeah, I guess I’ll tell so-and-so today’ … it’s just another chore to do for you.”

I then went on to reveal to him how I think it got to that point.

Of course, familiarity breeds comfort. The more I’ve told, the easier it gets. You get the speech down, what you going to say, what you are not going to say.

But probably what got me to that point the most was just accepting that regardless of how much time I put into planning what I was going to say, how I dwelled on saying it in the right way, how I attemped to convey my compassion for the magnitude and shock for the receipt of this information … it really didn’t matter.

After the first day or two … regardless of how I Disclosured, people’s reaction to the information was going to be based on their own internal processing.

Some might be confrontational, some might consider me a freak, some might simply deny and avoid themselves …

But practically all would eventually create a distance, between themselves and me.

It’s surprising to me how after Disclosing … even to my good friends or mere acquiantances … not only am I suddenly excluded from invitations to do things, even simple small things … but time alone with me disappears totally !!

I don’t know if it’s because they don’t want to risk being alone with me fearing what else I’d tell them, because they just consider me freakish, or because they just can’t deal with it so they think they hurt me less my removing me from their lives, but …

Phone calls and e-mails dwindle to nothing and IMs are non-existent.

And my Disclosures have went generally well ! lol

Imagine what it would be like had they been loud and harsh !!

So once I came to accept that once I told someone, that person would eventually try to figure out a way to reduce and remove their involvement in my life … I stopped worrying and dwelling on Disclosures.

Disclosures got easier for me when I accepted for myself that …

Disclosures are just another way of saying good-bye.

Or at the least … see ya later. 🙂