Before I started coming out, I never could’ve guessed how often I was going to stand in my own way. I really thought I was okay in who I was, and any issues that I had weren’t going to stem from me, but from other people. When I started to come out though, I noticed that I would find myself confused every time someone reacted in a positive way. It happened every time I would come out, to the point where I would almost get frustrated at the anti-climatic nature of it all. I told myself that it was probably just because I had spent so long building it up to be this dramatic moment in my head, and that allowed me to table the issue for a while.

Then I realized something else: the better I was feeling about the decision to come out, the harder it became for me to use identifiers, like “gay.” Whenever I came out, I would have to say it in a roundabout way, leaving myself to feel like I wasn’t communicating effectively, and the person I was trying to tell more than a little confused. I started to have doubts. I worried that somehow I’d been faking the whole thing and that I’d just gotten so convincing that I’d even fooled myself. No one I had ever talked to about being gay or watched on YouTube had said anything about this.

But then I decided to start watching some new people (I’ll probably make a separate article this month talking just about YouTubers that have really helped me out), and to my relief, I found a few people who’d had issues like this one. I realized that the problem wasn’t an ill-fitting identifier, and it certainly wasn’t that I was faking, it was that I was dealing with some shame that I hadn’t realized was there. It was clear that I had work to do, so I spent a lot of time soaking in as much validation as I could get, from various media forms and from those around me, and it has finally begun to reflect inward.

So, if you’re reading this and you’re struggling with the same kind of problem within yourself, the whole point of this article is to let you know that you’re okay, and if you identify with a label from deep down, there’s no way you’re faking it. To you, and to other members of the community, whether you're out or not, happy Pride!