Natalie Weiss

I guess most of the time I feel like a writer. I write almost every day, after all. But I have never felt like one day I would be a published author, even though it is my dream. Like, a book-on-the-shelf-at-the-bookstore published author.

That is, until recently.

It’s funny, because I have actually done the least amount of work on my novel in the past month and a half since I started writing it back in April. But I decided it was time to take this business seriously. To make some moves.

So I subscribed to WordPress, and I put my money where my mouth is, and I got a domain name. natalieweissbooks.com. It’s presumptuous. It assumes that not only will I publish a book, but I will publish books, plural. I made an Instagram account by the same name.

My favorite authors have these domain names. veronicarothbooks.com. johngreenbooks.com. I don’t know when they acquired them, whether it was before or after they got published. But I figured I could get a head start.

I had a couple of friends take photos of me at Potato Creek State Park. And, I think, that is when it sank in. This could be real. It looks so real right now. Is the gap between unrepresented and represented really that big? Is the space between unpublished and published really that wide?

I consume a lot of information on the publishing industry, so I know that, yes, it can be that big. It can be that wide. Minority authors are underrepresented, underpaid, undermarketed. I am lucky that the color of my skin is not an automatic ding on my credibility, on the numbers that accompany the dollar sign that publishers will see over my head. Other authors are not so lucky. I don’t know how my sexuality will impact my career though. I will say this – I am definitely grateful to be alive today, chasing this dream today, rather than at any time in the past. It’s been a slow – too slow – process of giving authors of color and other minority authors a chance in the publishing industry, but I do believe we are seeing change.

And I want to be a part of that change.

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This is the start. January 2019. When I get my first official apartment. One in which I intend to stay, at least until I move into a different apartment, or into a house that I buy or rent. I have a girlfriend. I have friends who know me. I get a new job. So many things change so quickly, but it feels like things are falling into place the way they are meant to.

Except I wish my family was a part of this.

Within the days and weeks after I come out, I receive enough links to internet articles about why homosexuality is a sin and how to be healed in texts from my mom that I end up silencing her number. I don’t have it in me to block her. I keep telling myself, “One more message like that, and I’ll block her.”

There is a book about it, too, tucked into one of the boxes she had tossed in the garage along with my other things. My girlfriend and I joke about using it to start a fire.

The jokes are a defense mechanism.

People who know what happened want to confront my parents, or do something to their house, or find a way to show their support for me and their disgust for homophobia that I can never quite see as constructive.

While grateful for the support, I shoot down any idea that takes out anger on my family. I still want to be my parents’ kid. And I still know them like no one else, save maybe my sister, knows them. I know the reasons for their responses go even deeper than religion. That unless you know the pain that my mom has been through, losing her father – a conservative, religious, hard-working man – at eighteen, and the things that still haven’t been resolved, then you won’t quite understand. I can’t paint heroines and villains in this story. I don’t want to.

That is not to say that I don’t believe in right and wrong. Or that I was wronged. I do. But I have learned enough about the human condition and about myself to know that the answer is so very rarely black and white. It is so very rarely what it appears on the surface. We categorize things, sift them into buckets of this or that in an attempt to make sense of the world. In an attempt to understand. In an attempt to take a side and never waiver. The strong person is one who never backs down from what they believe, right? I don’t believe that. I believe that the strong person is one who admits their faults and is willing to compromise, willing to cross lines in an attempt to understand. The strong person is willing to listen.

2019 honestly goes by in a blur. I help open a new facility for the gym I now work for. I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend and her family. She and I have our disagreements, but mostly, things are steady. I daydream about our future together, and I can see it. I can see the spot I’ll ask her to marry me. I can see the wedding we’ll have – outdoors and casual, a celebration, nothing outlandish. I can see the years passing together, and I believe they will be happy.

The one thing that doesn’t happen is this: I don’t publicly come out. The most public way I know to do it is to announce it on social media and to write a blog post about it. I expected that once I told my parents, a weight would lift from my shoulders, and I’d feel free to blast my sexuality all over the internet. I always knew this: my parents’ disappointment would hurt the most, nothing could compare to their rejection. So when the weight still feels heavy, I am surprised. When I still find it impossible to say “my girlfriend” in conversation with coworkers who are becoming good friends, I am upset. I feel cheated. Coming out was supposed to be a one-time deal. That’s how the media portrays it. That’s how everything I read about it makes it seem.

Looking back, I guess it does seem silly. What? Was I going to come out to my parents and then just start wearing rainbow shirts every day? I might as well tattoo “I’m gay” across my forehead.

No. Accepting myself, accepting the hand I’ve been dealt in terms of family and environment, accepting what being queer stills means in society, especially in a place like Indiana, was always going to be a never-ending process.

And so I still have to come out.

Sometimes it is easy, like when I show up to an event with my girlfriend, her hand in mine, and people can look at us and go, “Oh.” Or when I am with her, and I introduce her as “my girlfriend.” When she is with me, I have to be honest. Even if it feels uncomfortable. I refuse to do her the disservice of fudging what she means to me. And, I imagine, when she is there, when people have to look at the two of us together, it is safer. I imagine people are less likely to reject me when they have to reject the both of us.

But sometimes, coming out is still hard. I spend hours a day with one of my coworkers, and we talk about everything. At least, it seems like everything. It feels like everything. But it’s not. We’ve known each other for almost a year when she tells me, “You never use your friends’ names.” I don’t. It’s easier to just say, friend, friend, friend, friend. To paint this one word over all of the people in my life, to be so vague so that the truth isn’t obvious. If I had known what this coworker would become to me – a confidant, a stand-in therapist, a person I bounce nearly every idea off of – I would’ve said “my girlfriend” from the beginning. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t know, at the beginning, that she was not homophobic. And once my girlfriend becomes “my friend,” it is so hard to make that switch to telling the whole truth.

But eventually, I do it. I’ve been talking to this coworker about going back to school, maybe back to West Lafayette, for another bachelor’s degree. She tells me I don’t have anything holding me here, so why not? But I do have something holding me here. I have a girlfriend. My coworker’s words haunt me for a couple of days before I know it is inevitable. I know I have to tell her.

And it still feels like every other time. The pounding heart. The disassociation. The nervous laugh and out-of-place grin. But, like every other time – even the times the outcome could’ve been better, I feel so relieved afterwards.

And so, it is still baby steps. It is still little by little.

Like with my parents.

It took a few months after Christmas Day 2018, but my mom starts texting me normal things again. I don’t know, but I suspect that just like last time – like when I was twelve and I kind of came out to my parents – my mom has chosen to view my sexuality as this unspeakable thing. If we don’t talk about it, maybe it will go away. So we don’t talk about it. But this time I know, it’s not going to go away.

And so I don’t know what it will be like when I sit down with my parents and I tell them that I want them to meet the love of my life. I don’t know if they will be at my wedding. I don’t know if they will visit my house, when my wife and I have one, and there’s a little coffee nook and a garden and a fire pit in the backyard. I don’t know if they will come over.

I don’t know if they will come around.