Living Straight

(For my 3rd blogaversary I’m publishing select previously private blog entries. Originally drafted in Fall 2007. I left the below mentioned straight job in Spring 2008 and never looked back, until this moment.)

Or, how to pick the easy way out.

I got a straight job. I got a monogamous relationship with a straight boy – not necessarily a problem, but this is not how I thought my life would look. This isn’t what I signed up for.

I get up at seven to leave by eight to be there at nine. I go to a real office, I wear real clothes, I use my legal name. I’m still freelance – so, no benefits of the straight life come attached, except one: acceptance.

When I started caring about that little thing, I’m not sure.

If I’d been terribly big on acceptance I wouldn’t have been topless on the internet. Or an ordained Pagan minister. Or any of the other hundred and one things I’ve been, and am, openly.

I’ve wasted so much time pretending to be someone else’s normal.

It’s just that I got tired of dodging when asked what I do for a living. (Now people dodge me, in fear of my at-the-ready business cards.) When my friends griped about work I said nothing, because I was afraid of revealing what I did – of how that would reflect on my lover.

I thought of all the public advocacy work I wanted to do and decided I didn’t want to attract that kind of attention, because then his parents would realize, and what would that mean?

I was a coward.

He’s a good one – he never had a problem with my chosen work. I was working off my own decisions, my own assumptions. The pressure was internal – or where external, not from him. But I had a problem with self-censoring. I had a problem with living a lie. And I was too much of a coward – I called it being discreet – to be out with it where reasonable, for fear of who it’d get back to.

Only, someday I’ll be older, and I’ll wish I’d done it all fearlessly like I started out, when I was young enough to get away with it.

There’ll be time enough for pretending…

Only I don’t want to pretend.

I’ve always gotten bored with discretion. I’ve got a restless instinct to shake off all the bullshit.

But here I am, sunk cost fallacy at the ready: “I’ve already invested all this time and money.”

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and frankly I’m buried in debt and I want to die.

Not for any reason but that I just don’t see any point in doing this another day. Things don’t seem to ever get better.

I wish it wasn’t important to me, what I did; or, no, I wish it was more important to me, so that I would have pushed myself more, been more successful, compromised less on the things that drove me.

Instead I have to go off tomorrow to a job I’m unfortunately very good at and smile and pretend I didn’t wish I was in my home office, in my lingerie, taking calls from my favorites.

It’s silly and it’s whining – everyone wishes they were at home in their underwear getting paid to be sexual; nobody likes going off to their boring job. And of course there were times I didn’t want to log in…

…but I didn’t hate it. I just hated not being able to tell. Or, no, I hated not feeling honest.