Coming Out: The early years and accepting myself

My coming out story is a complex one. It’s hard to determine where to start because coming out for me was six years in the making. I guess that I will just start when I started to notice that I was different than other boys. This occurred at a young age for me, maybe eight? I’m not entirely sure. But I noticed it at a young age. I was always wanting to play house, Barbies, My Little Ponies, etc. with the neighborhood girls. I enjoyed that aspect of make believe over toy guns, wars, and sports. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy going for bike rides, roller blading, catching lizards, and typical boy activities with the neighbor boys. I guess that I had a good healthy mixture of doing both activities, but I was never as close to the boys as with the girls. I remember feeling different and awkward at times around the boys. As I grew older, most of my best friends were girls. I loved spending time with them and they tended to be more tomboys, which allowed me to be both feminine and masculine. It was a great way to grow up and helped be cultivate both my feminine and masculine sides.

I developed my first crush in fourth grade. His name was Robert. He was popular, cute, and sweet. He was one of the only popular boys who were nice to me. He would invite me to play sports with them and he would sometimes sit with me at lunch. I enjoyed his company and would think about him a lot. At the time, I thought that I just really wanted to be his friend and to become popular; however, as I have looked back, it is so obvious that I had a crush on him. I used to fantasize about hanging out with him and nobody else—being best friends. I had a crush on him for many years and other crushes developed too. They tended to be the popular boys who were the most attractive at school.

In seventh grade, I started to explore my sexuality. I discovered pornography and learned very quickly that I didn’t like straight porn. Within a couple of weeks, I found and was watching gay porn. This occurred throughout all of my teenage years with my parents catching me a couple of times, but I lied my way out it. This was the first step of my coming out process. This is when I first questioning if I was gay, but I remained in complete denial. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want that to be the reason why I was different than the other boys and why I felt that I was the only Mormon who felt this way. As I grew up, I was angsty when it came to the topic of my sexuality. I would punish myself with scripture study, prayers, and service in order to get rid of the gay. I did everything that I could so that I could understand myself or change. I was in denial. I didn’t want to be gay, let alone different.

Over the years, I started to realize that I wasn’t going to change and that God wasn’t going to change me. This was when I was about sixteen. I started to be ok with the fact that I am gay. I started to call myself gay in my head. I didn’t really know what it meant though. I knew that I liked men and fantasized about them and I knew that I this was part of who I am—nothing that I could do would change that fact because I already had gone through it. My crushes became even stronger and I started to joke with friends by pretending to be gay at times. I almost ended up confessing my big secret to a guy friend, but I couldn’t do it. As I started accepting myself, I became happier and started loving life again.

I graduated from high school without coming out, but I came close to coming out to some friends a couple of times. When I entered college, things changed drastically for me. I didn’t feel the pressure to hide anymore and I was ready to reveal my secret.

Escape

A lot has transpired since J and I decided to take a break from one another. First of all, I passed my thesis proposal on Monday! This was a huge step and a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. I feel like this was a huge source of my unhappiness. Since I have finished it, I don’t feel as stressed about lab and I feel like I can start moving forward in my research. It has been amazing to feel good and that I accomplished something worthwhile again. I’ve missed that feeling.

Besides that, I have been going to therapy and been doing a lot of thinking because of it. I have started to realize that I need to have escapes from reality—these escapes help keep me balanced and centered. I’ve always had these in the past in high school and college, but have since lost them. These escapes can be almost anything that doesn’t feel routine to me. These include getting lost in the world of Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV, reading a book, coming home to Utah, leaving the bubble I live in, escaping into nature, leaving NYC, sitting on top of a roof, swimming in the pool, cooking/baking, and spending quality time with friends. These escapes save me. They allow me to remove parts of my stress and realize that the world is much bigger than everything that is going on in my life.

I was going to move out of my current apartment in student housing and move into an “adult” apartment within the city at the end of this school year, but I’m not sure if that is going to happen anymore. Moving out will significantly increase my cost of living and I won’t have as much money to do the escapes that I want to do. I want to start going camping upstate, which isn’t cheap. I will have to rent a car and buy some gear, but I think sacrificing moving out of the dorm housing and spending time escaping into nature will be better for me. Then if I could get friends to go with me, I’ll be able to form amazing bonds with them away from the city, technology, and the hustle and bustle of the city. I’ve decided that I need to have at least one escape a month with or without friends.

I feel good about making more escapes in my life and other decisions that I have been making. These active choices will bring me more happiness and help me get back to my old self and away from the self that NYC has transformed me into. I’m ready to be healed and the first healing is taking place with my journey back to Zion. I’m excited to be back.

Losing Passion

A lot of my unhappiness stems from the fact that I am losing the passion and drive in my life. I am stagnating and feel like I am in a rut. I am no longer passionate about science. I loath doing experiments that fail, data analysis, writing grants, reading papers, etc. I just don't enjoy it like I used to. I have been trying to figure out what it is and why I have lost my interest in it. I can't fully place my finger on it and I wish that I could so that I can fix it. Here are some of my thoughts and ideas as to why I just don't care about science anymore.

I feel like a slave and that I am never doing enough. When I was at BYU doing undergraduate research, I loved going into lab. It was always fun and I enjoyed reading papers and coming up with new ideas. I never felt like I was tied down in the lab and I could work as little or as much as I pleased. At the NIH, I didn't like my research experience very much, but I attributed that to the fact that I didn't particularly enjoy my project, my boss, and my co-workers--I could never jive and connect with them and I felt like an outsider. But as I experience graduate school more and struggle through my PhD, I am coming to realize that I didn't like my time at the NIH and research here at school because I feel like I am a slave. I am supposed to be doing experiments constantly and performing the necessary data analysis. If I am not busy, there is always this pressure to do experiments and start new ones. Then when I get the chance to read journal articles, I am too burned out to even look at science. The intellectual aspect is gone and no longer a part of research for me. I don't feel like a student and I don't feel like I can take the time to spend learning that I want to. I need to be working and producing results. Basically, I feel like I can never doing enough work and that I should always be doing more.

In that same stream of thought, I think another reason why I am unhappy is because there are no markers for success in graduate school. I have been working hard on a project for over a year, but I feel like I have nothing to show. I gave a presentation a couple months ago about my work and people were impressed, but then brought up a lot of other experiments that I need to do in order to make it even better and publishable. While this great, it makes me feel like I am not achieving anything--there is always something more to be done. Throughout my whole life, there have been markers (i.e. tests, end of semesters, grades, etc.) that have given me markers of success. Now, I have none. There is nothing to show for my work. Every day I work hard and seem to never achieve much. It's exhausting and it's causing me to burn out. I struggle to know if what I am doing is going to be worth it and if I am succeeding at it. Sigh... graduate school is just tiring me out because of the lack of success.

The last big bit of my unhappiness with my current situation lies in the fact that my passion is currently in medicine. I see my classmates that I entered with going on interviews and getting ready to start their careers while I am stuck at school. Additionally, I no longer see myself doing research on a specific disease. My passion is in primary care. I want to get involved in holistic and preventative medicine. I don't want to get caught up in sub-specialities and prescriptions. I want to stop disease before it starts, instead of treating disease once it has already been established. Disease research is at the pinnacle of sub-specialization and it is very focused on one disease and problem. I don't see a future being hyper-focused. I seem myself interacting and helping a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid. Medicine needs to change from the bottom up and I hope to be a part of that change. Because my passion lies in medicine and there is currently not much that I can do in medicine, it is hard to come to work every day when I know that I would rather be somewhere else.

I need to figure out ways to gain passion in science again because I still have 4.5 years left in my program. I am working on being happier, but if all of this doesn't work out. I'll probably just quit, travel the world, and open a bakery.

On A Break

It's been awhile since I have written. I have a lot that has been on my mind, but I haven't had the heart to share it all. I guess that I needed to process everything before I wrote it down.

Well, soon after I wrote my post about being insecure, J broke off our dating relationship. He told me that he couldn't handle the stresses of both a relationship and school at the same time right now, and that he needed to focus on school. He said that he could still see a future relationship with me, but that right now wasn't the right timing. When he first told me, I was doing everything that I could to convince him not to end it and to remain with me, instead of just be close friends. He stuck to his guns and left. I spent a couple weeks processing everything and I felt strangely good about his decision. I felt sad that I was losing him at this moment, but for the most part, I felt good, albeit a little bit melancholy. During this time, I realized that he made the right decision and that we needed a break from one another.

We met up after a couple weeks and went to an Affirmation Thanksgiving together. It was wonderful being with him again and I didn't feel any awkwardness. It felt normal to me and that nothing had changed. After the Thanksgiving, we drove around and talked. We had a great conversation about us and our future. I told him about my feelings towards him and everything that he said to me. It was good that I was able to get everything off my chest. We both decided to take a break, a step back to being close friends, and meet up with one another again in Utah at Christmas. I think that this will be good for us.

A break will allow us to become stronger on our own and be more ready for a relationship with one another, if we go that route again. He needs to spend time becoming more confident with medical school and I need to find happiness again--I have been terribly unhappy the past six month with all aspects of my life besides J. We will become what we are meant to become after this time apart. J is a wonderful man and I would consider myself lucky to call him mine, but if we remain only friends, I will still consider myself lucky to call him a close friend.

It's been about a month since we have been on our break and it has been difficult at times, but it has been mostly good. I have started therapy and I am learning a lot about myself, some that I already knew but didn't know how it affected those around me. I wake up most mornings thinking about J and what's going on his life and if everything is ok with him. I wonder if he is thinking about me. I went home for Thanksgiving, which was wonderful to spend time with my family and talk with them, but also melancholy. I have a lot of great memories with J in Utah and I wanted to share them with him again, but couldn't. This made me sad and nostalgic. Hopefully, I'll be able to share those memories with him again when we meet up in a couple weeks.

I miss him, but I know that things will work out and we will become what we are meant to become.