Sexual Orientation

Embracing Your Sexuality

One's sexual orientation does not define who they are as a person. It's simply a biological attraction to someone of a certain sex. Primarily, you’re heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual – in terms of sexual attractions (this doesn’t include gender identity, which will be touched on later).

After all, you never see someone judged for being a heterosexual person. That’s the implied norm. But per society’s notions, anyone not toeing that hetero line is somehow different and thus they are most certainly judged by their sexual orientation. This is the primary reason that millions of guys and girls across the globe fear coming out with their sexuality more than they fear anything else.

Not only are gay, bi and lesbian individuals made to feel inferior, but transgendered individuals are the new demons in society – harshly judged as confused freaks.

Throughout this guide, we will touch on different ways in which you can work to come out with your sexuality. Keeping who you are as a person—by birth, not by choice—locked inside can lead to some seriously bad situations. The rates of anxiety, depression, drug usage, promiscuous sex and suicide are astronomically high in the LBGT community (to scale). It’s these repressed feelings that drive people to do some crazy things. Freeing yourself of the chains that bind is a great way to get some peace of mind and serenity in your life.

It may not be easy to do, but embracing your sexuality is a must if you hope to lead a healthy, productive life.

The Decision to Come Out

Coming out with your sexuality not only changes your life, but it will affect the lives of others you care about. However, you should not be deterred if you believe someone will have a negative reaction. It has been the case in many of individuals lives where coming out has damaged the family, but in today’s modern age, the overwhelming majority of those who come out are embraced by those who care about them the most

The decision to come out should be a personal decision done for you and for no one else. It is up to you to reconcile your sexual orientation, and coming out can really allow you to grow as an individual. Living a secretive life, on the other hand, is how you end up with stress, depression and potential suicidal tendencies.

It can seem like an insurmountable hurdle. It might be incredibly stressful. How will you be treated? Will your family accept you? These questions are impossible to answer, as every individual will have their own reaction to something like this. But for most people, what was once abnormal—being something other than heterosexual—is slowly but surely becoming much less of a shock.

A good tip here is to seek some help if you’re having trouble with your decision. You can find help from many, many places, including but not limited to:

•    Other members of the LGBT community who have come out

•    Community message boards and forums online

•    On-location support groups

•    Friends and family members who already know

•    Psychiatrists

Tips for Coming Out

Coming out with your sexuality and telling the people closest to you about your sexual orientation is a lot easier said than done. This is why many individuals need help with their decision. We will go over a few great tips you can use when making the decision to come out.

Accept Yourself First

Before you can expect anyone else to accept you, you first need to accept yourself. Growing up with the idea that guys like girls and girls like guys and that’s the way it is – that can be very psychologically damaging to someone who realizes that they do not fit that mold. However you need to reconcile your sexual orientation, this should be your first step in coming out. Accept yourself to find acceptance.

Reach Out for a Rock

If we’re lucky, we all have that one special friend who is always there for us. It could be a family member. It could be someone you grew up with. It doesn’t matter. As long as you have that proverbial rock in your life, this is the person you should come out to first. Once they know and accept you, everything else is made a bit easier.

Research the Community

By researching the community at large, you can prepare yourself for some of the things you may face upon coming out. Some individuals don’t exactly know what it’s like across the board in terms of discrimination. Anyone from anywhere can have any type of sexual orientation, so a girl from Small-Town Idaho, population 800, doesn’t have the same picture of society as someone from NYC. So be sure you research the community.

Work your way Up the Ladder

Your inclination may be to sit everyone down in a big group and just come out with it to get it over with. But an intervention-style confession (for lack of a better word) is something cut out for Hollywood but not for coming out to your loved ones. The best approach here is to first come out to the person you’re closest to. From there, you can work your way up the ladder with that person’s help. This way, if anyone in the family is having trouble with the issue, you can have some back-up to ease your way out. Having support with you is a powerful, comforting tool.

Dealing with the Aftermath

Even broaching the topic with kids’ gloves and pandering to other people as not to upset them, you still run the risk of alienating some people in your life. Members of the LGBT community are ostracized in some circles, and it seems that nothing can get through to those who would shun a sexual orientation they see as being different or, even worse, sinful.

Coming out has ruined families, as we touched on above, and it can drive those closest to you away if they didn’t previously know. But all that aside, you need to realize that someone’s lack of acceptance of you is their problem and their problem alone. Although it might hurt you emotionally to know that someone you care about will not accept you for who you are, the biggest issue you should be dealing with in your life is learning to accept yourself for you. After that, people have to live with how they treat others. You’re doing nothing wrong; it’s their bigotry and fantastical notions of what normal is that cause them to treat you as if you’re the one who’s different.

Embracing who you are—not a what; who!—is the best you can do. Everything else is just everything else. If someone holds your orientation over you in a negative way, you should simply look the other way.

In a perfect world, we could fight every individual tooth and nail until they understood that acceptance is love, but realistically, someone’s lack of acceptance is simply their problem. Coming out and embracing your sexuality is what needs to be done for you; to hell with everyone else.

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