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Coming Out Is Easier Than I Thought
Written by Elisabeth on Tuesday, March 2, 2010
When I started wheeling, I was very concerned about coming out. Would I lose friends? How would people react? How would I take the rejection? Well, so far it went much better than expected.
I was afraid at the beginning. Some of you were very encouraging about coming out. Telling me that people usually react better than what we expect. I have to agree with you. My rejection rate: 20%. My male rejection rate: 50%. My female rejection rate: 0%.
I have told so far only 10 people what my real reason for wheeling is. I believe it’s a private info for my friends only. Most people don’t need details. Most people really don’t want to know details. They are curious but not concerned about me. If you don’t know even my name, it’s none of your business. That’s how it works for me – you need to know me as a person first, then you can ask about my disability.
So my sister knows. She’s cool about it, her only concern is what she would do if I wanted to harm myself physically. It’s not an issue now, so she doesn’t have to worry. Then I told a few of my girl friends. It helps that they are older, 50+. They have seen a lot. They judge less. Some of them have experience with depression – they manage it with drugs. Some of them have a child with developmental disability. They know that one has to work with the brain, not against it, in order to manage. Some are very philosophical, realizing that we all are different. Some of them understood BIID more, some of them less. But they all had the same answer: Whatever works for you, whatever makes you live you life, whatever enables you, whatever manages your BIID, is fine with me. I am happy for you.
And then come the men. My weekday priest – cool about it. Not understanding it a bit but open enough not to give me any guilt-trip. My friend I enjoy breakfast with every week. I was a bit concerned (Hi to you if you read it. Finally I will talk about you). His first reaction to the wheelchair was in line of conventional thinking. Trying to help me a lot. He got first my "bad foot" reason that probably didn’t help either. But after me telling him more about wheeling and what I like or not, he was fine after a few weeks. We have good talks, including talks about disabilities. Eventually after a couple of months I told him about my BIID and he took it well. We are still friends. Curiously, he is the only person apart from my sister who ever asked about learning more about BIID.
And then come the two men, the only two people under age of forty I ever told. The ones who believe that my BIID is a work of the devil and that wheeling will lead me to a crazy house. Too bad, one of them lives with me. His reaction that he could get annulment for our marriage because obviously I was crazy even before we got married, that hurt. But I learned some stuff about him too during our discussion and it helped our marriage to go on. You know about the other one – my dear Sunday priest. He is still very concerned about me. He was hoping that I would stop wheeling immediately and was shocked that I would defy him and disagree with him. He didn’t have time to perform a prayer of deliverance from the evil of BIID yet and I will entertain him with it. I know he is praying very much for me and I think God is redirecting his prayers toward my relationship with my mama. I feel a lot of inner healing there, great. Keep praying… So even though these two men had an idiotic reaction, some good came out of it.
So my path of coming out is painful at times but always beneficial. And I will keep telling my friends about BIID. Because their reaction tells me so much about them – about their conventional thinking, about their openness or judgment, about their attitude toward both mental and physical disabilities and people with disabilities, it tells me more about who they are. They also feel that they can share their struggles with me more easily. But ultimately my sharing tells me if they really like me, my real me, or if they like the appearance of me, the idea of me they have in their head. It’s freeing when our relationships are based on truth. After all, that’s what we, people with BIID, are trying to do – to live our lives based on the truth of our BIID, to be true to what our brains tell us. It’s not easy, it’s not easy to face the truth and it’s not easy to live the truth. But in the end, that’s the only way to live.
Thank you, all my friends, for not judging, for your acceptance, for being happy for me.
And thanks to all of you who encouraged me to be frank with my friends. It worked.
Tags: BIID, Coming Out, Wheelchair
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3 Comments
The interesting stuff with my husband is that he is no stranger to depression and anxiety attacks, he is also extremely introverted, someone who knows the agony of mental illness yet can’t apply it to me. He believes that I have a very easy and comfy life.
My only young friends are from my little European country and as my country is rather well known for its prejudice and homophobia, I am yet to muster enough courage to tell them.
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1 On 2 March, 2010, Chloe said:
I am SO glad that you are generally having a good experience with this aspect of BIID. I just wish I had something useful to say regarding your husband. Time often helps it seems; some people take a while to adjust to the idea.
Perhaps things went relatively easily with my partner because she also has her laundry list of mental illnesses. We both recognise that we put up with quite a lot in terms of each other’s eccentricities. Yesterday we acknowledged to each other that there simply isn’t anything we could disclose that had the potential of diminishing our mutual love and compassion.
You got me thinking about why it is that I seem to have a phenomenal success rate in face to face BIID disclosures; only one rejection out of about a hundred so far. One possibility is that my ensemble of friends is quite far from a cross-section of the general population. It is highly skewed in favor of people who are transgendered, intersexed, mentally ill, or psychotherapists. I can think of good reasons why people in any of these categories would be particularly accepting of BIID. My one failure happened to be a psychotherapist.
That is an interesting point about whether there is any gender or age correlation with acceptance. My disclosures have been to people from teens through sixties. The one failure was a woman in her sixties
It is also of interest exactly what people’s concerns are. The e-mail I received from my sister today is typical, and also reflective of your own experience. She is very supportive but concerned about what will become of my love of hiking and skiing if I am still intending to go ahead with surgery. Well, I’ve already been hiking with a leg brace and crutch. And the forthcoming Paralympics should convince anyone that paralysis does not mean the end of skiing.