Coming Out Of Our Diverse Closets.

The term ‘coming out’ is generally a metaphor for individual's self disclosure of their sexual orientation or of their gender identity. Seen as a privacy issue, coming out is experienced as a psychological process or journey. It is a process and not just a moment and is often accompanied with stress and not always met with understanding, to say the least. But there could be other coming outs too. Like coming out about our struggles, conditions, rape, abuse and violence.

“Coming out” about our painful experiences and mental health conditions comes with its own difficulties. Telling someone of our mental illness or of our shame and abuse can be nerve-wracking and painful, even if we’re telling a friend and not screaming it to the entire world. Whether it’s telling one person, a crowd or the internet, it’s still hard.

To tell someone, sounds easy, like I woke up one day and decided to say something out of the blue. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. It takes time to come to the decision and work up to speaking. One of the reasons it is so hard is because as people we tend to run away from discomfort and pain that’s our primal tendency. Most strugglers will attest to the fact that their pain was not well received or that they dint feel validated and were often waived off with responses which were in line with “It’s okay, forget about it, don’t think much.  The society also stigmatizes mental illness. Our cultural understanding of personal struggles is that you are just not trying hard enough. Interestingly we never say that about physical illnesses like cancer or heart disease.

There are a lot of fears that run through your mind when thinking about disclosing pain or mental illness:

• How will this person react when I tell them?
• Will this change how they think of me?
• Will they still want to be my friend/significant other/co-worker/boss/spouse?
• Will I be still considered capable at work?
• Will my family be angry if I “go public”?

“Keep talking until you comfortable doing it” - is the best advice doing rounds on “coming out”. All the brave souls who have been there and done that and have also inspired many others to do so swear by the above. It's a difficult journey for all of us. If you are struggling, support from friends and family can go a long way to help find love, recover, manage conditions, and lead happy, healthy lives.   

If you are thinking of “your coming out” whatever that maybe - your identity, orientation, state, condition, pain to name a few , or you know someone who is contemplating,  here are 3 things one could do and take the plunge.

1.    Accept Yourself in Toto

Opening one’s mouth here requires strength. This could mean looking stigma in the face and saying to yourself “I am willing to stand up to the shame if any”.  It means confronting the possibility of discrimination, ridicule and change. It means convincing yourself you care about the possible consequences, but are willing to take the chance, even if deep down they terrify you.

2.    Be Prepared

Its nice to do a little bit of mental preparations – in case things don’t go well.  If the response from your trusted one is not in line with your expectation or you feel let down, how would you respond to that. Think and take your time to be okay with that. There is no hurry. This little bit of preparation for a possible bad-case scenario would definitely help calm the nerves.

 3.    Just Do It

If you have though of telling, go ahead and do it. Thinking over and over only makes it worse. The primitive part of our brain designed to keep us safe and away from pain would definitely revolt. The revolt could strong enough to cause physical symptoms of flight. So, take steps 1 and 2 and jump to 3.