Landing

Everyone is always coming out all the time, if they are creative and growing.  If you’re gay, and you do the big “coming out,” maybe you are a step ahead.  Everyone has to come out of one cocoon after another.  I feel quite grouchy about it just now, although I guess it’s beautiful and all.

I’ve been public lately, and I’m about to help hold another big (for me) public event.

It’s less that I feel exposed and more that I feel trapped.  Yer basic fear of commitment.  Like, what if I decide I want to do something else that night? What if I just don’t feel like it?  Could I just leave the door open and go back to my place and watch old episodes of “America’s Next Top Model” all evening?  At the end of the school year, the responsibility of my students has worn me down.  I’m especially sensitive to every responsibility, every weight right now.

The adolescence is coming out and making things and worrying, still, that the cool kids will see it, or won’t see it, or will disapprove.  Who the cool kids are is a flexible concept.  Usually for me being a cool kid is knowing me a little but not much, or appearing to have something that I think I want.  Like big boobs, or the ability to do the splits.

During adolescence, I noticed that Christmas wasn’t so special.  It was such a huge deal that it was hard to be there for it.  Was it really Christmas, like, now?  Now?

I check the guestlist on facebook compulsively.  A bigger number feeds my ego, and then it makes me want to hide under the bed.  What was I thinking?  What have I done?  Not really.  I hide on the bed.  Claustrophobia, remember.

I listened to the radio interview, and I didn’t hate the sound of my voice.  I just grimaced at how I laughed all the time, like I’m flighty or vapid.  Or it could be that I try to make other people comfortable by chuckling, and I don’t take myself seriously.  Fifteen years ago, no one was less able to laugh at herself.  I’ve made a lot of progress.

This is my second big event, and the first one, I was occasionally able to enjoy.  It was great to have a ton of people I love in one place, but it was a bummer that I hardly got to hang out with any of them.  Too busy.

Last night I tried to take a pill real quick, and it sat in my mouth a second while I looked for water, and it burned my tongue, and I washed it down with only a sliver of a drink, and my whole chest burned and my stomach screamed.  I tried to go to sleep.  Instead, dragged myself out to drugstore at midnight for drugs.  Tums helped a little.  But it took forever to sleep.  Discomfort puts you in the moment so neatly.

Usually my cure is finding the right thing to wear, the right song, the right thing to read, the right movie to watch, the right place to sit.  A strange and shallow cure?  Well.  It’s finding a way into the moment, to creating it along with time and stuff, to participating in it.  A tricky business.  How to come out not just to appear (good feminist) but to do, as well.  Be comfortable appearing and being looked at, as part of the whole human picture of seeing and being seen.