i finally came out to a member of my family, my sister whom ive been slightly closer with than everyone else. my family are all conservative christian trump supporters including my sister but she seems like she's not as brainwashed as the rest of them. a few days before thanksgiving i told my sister i'm queer and i've had sex with guys before and i didn't really know what to expect, i figured it could go either way - she could either react with shock and horror and shun me forever, or she could be supportive and accepting about it.
at first it seemed like the second thing happened, she was surprisingly very nice and supportive and told me she loved me and was totally okay with it and she promised not to tell anyone else in the family. then comes thanksgiving and nobody in my family calls me or wants to talk to me at all, not one of them. days pass and i still haven't heard from anyone in my family, they always call me or at least text me on the holidays but now nothing. finally i get suspicious and i text my sister and just ask "hey is mom ok, she hasn't been talking to me much" and i see the "user is typing" notification for a very long time, then it disappears and comes back, then again, several rewrites before she finally responds saying my mom was just busy and gives me this list of excuses and then my mom suddenly calls my phone minutes later and she tells me the same list of excuses almost word for word, and then she starts demanding to know why i'm asking my sister about her (even though she called me). finally i ask her to just be straight with me and she says "i am being straight, i am being VERY straight." in a very snotty tone and i finally just say "fuck it" and tell her exactly what i told my sister and she seems not surprised or shocked, she just immediately starts grilling me demanding to know the names of the men that i've slept with in the past and if they were anyone she knows, while simultaneously insisting that it's completely fine and she doesn't care if i'm queer.
one of the reasons i decided to come out was because a few years ago i heard from my mother that my eldest niece, my older brother's kid, came out to her parents and, at the behest of my mother, they told her that she was just confused and it was just a phase and told themselves that too and they never mentioned it again. i felt so bad for her and i see her now being depressed and alienated and going through the same issues i went through at her age and i wanted her to know that she isn't the only one. i mentioned that whole incident with my niece's attempt to come out during that last phone call with my mother but she pretended to not know what i was talking about. she says it never happened, my niece is not gay and never said she was gay, she doesn't remember anything like that ever happening. i asked my sister about it and, after another suspiciously long period of typing, she also says she doesn't remember that ever happening, even though i remember her talking about it too.
basically what i am finally realizing, way too late, is that my mother has narcissistic personality disorder and is a pathological liar and she lies constantly and believes her own lies and does not believe in objective reality, she denies things that she's seen with her own eyes, claims to have witnessed events that are physically impossible, she rewrites events of her life and changes stories every time she tells them, and she manipulates people around her and makes them believe the same things too, or at least pretend to believe them and corroborate her lies. everyone in my family is under her thumb, they all have secret deliberations with my mom where she tells them what to do and what to say, they all live in a consensual false reality. and i'm not even going to try to list off all the insane manipulative shit my mother has done that i figured out years later when i got older and got out of her house and started doing therapy and shit, things like secret phone calls deliberately trying to sabotage my friendships/relationships, telling me that my father's instances of violent abuse were all dreams or hallucinations when i was a child, blaming me for her blood pressure and health issues and accusing me of wanting to kill her, etc.
i'm realizing that my lifelong mental health issues and depression and psychosis and all these other problems i've had since childhood come from a lifetime of lies and manipulation and gaslighting which have quite literally destroyed my mind and made me completely insane and its taken years of therapy and will probably take many more to deal with the consequences of that. multiple therapists have told me this, that my family sound like a "high control group" and my mother sounds like a narcissist and pathological liar but i just didn't want to accept it, they would tell me that but i wouldn't really hear it. it really is like star trek when picard says that he genuinely saw five lights instead of four, that shit really happens. you don't want to believe that an evil like this could exist in the world, especially not your own mother. anyway what i've learned finally is that i can't ever have a relationship with anyone in my family, i can never fix them or change them or get them to be honest with me, i have to cut them all out of my life forever for the sake of my own sanity.
people think the worst thing that can happen telling your family that you are gay is being disowned or screamed at or whatever, but that's fucking nothing compared to this shit. i mean, i'm glad i finally told them the truth about me and figured out the truth about them after 36 fucking years of bottling this shit up, but still it sucks. there's not much closure or satisfaction in accepting this reality, but at least it is reality. or is it?
Well, better that it jenga'd as soon as it did rather than it continuing to be like that without realizing it. Something dialectics something.