Coming out of the closet

No, not That Closet.

However, for the briefest moment I could understand why it’s such a difficult thing to do, especially to one’s family. Have you ever found yourselves watching a movie and not being able to comprehend why the character had such trouble admitting his or her sexual orientation to their parents? You think: what’s the big deal, their parents will understand and a parent’s love won’t be changed by a thing like that, will it?

Yap, well, we apparently never took in consideration what the characters themselves were going through. I will exemplify.

The other day I came out to my mother… about being Agnostic. Yes, we are talking religion here. For those of you who have trouble understanding what agnostic means, here are some pages that will offer more information, better than I could ever put it: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agnostic or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism .

Just so that you understand what I mean by it, I should add that I consider myself as an Empirical Agnostic, or like I explained it some time ago to some friends, while believers believe in some form of God, and atheists believe there is no God, I know for sure that I have no idea (pun intended) whether there is a God or not, but I’m open to either possibility. Since we currently have no information to confirm nor deny the existence of a God, I prefer to withhold judgment until/if evidence becomes available.

This may be a by-product of my analytical mind, or my inquisitive nature, or even the logical being that resides inside me and cannot accept that religion is something else rather than a set of rules and norms meant to be followed in times when laws and regulation were harder to impose on people without the scare of supervision from some sort of Unseen All-knowing entity.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about my traumatic experience coming out to my mother. I know, I know, I use the term loosely and too frequently, but I like it’s 'in your face' value.

I have started to understand how I feel and think about my religious believes for quite a while, and I recently found out there was a name for it, namely agnosticism.

Until the other day, I had not had the chance to talk it out with my family. Mind you, I will not start discussing it – if I can avoid it – with my grandparents, mainly because I can predict pretty well how they would react: my grandma would most likely wickedly smile and agree with me, my parental grandfather would probably be hurt and disappointed – he wanted to become a priest in his day – and my maternal grandfather, well, I have no idea, but since he was always a joker, I don’t really worry about him. Like I don’t worry much about my father, who I think secretly feels the same way I do.

My mom, well, she reacted in unexpected ways. Yes, I said ways, because her reactions were several, and very different, within a very short period of time. You see, this all thing started with us talking about some Christian ritual, and she had the much uninspired idea to ask me what I think about it. Now, any other day I would have carefully dodged the question and went to Christian doctrine for my answer, like I did so far, but the truth was I was tired, a bit edgy and didn’t know a lot about the said Christian ritual to begin with. So I told her “well, first of all, I don’t consider myself a practicing Christian”, which set the roof on fire, or, if you are a believer, when all hell broke loose. In retrospect, you could say she was spoiling for a fight in the first place, but I definitely didn’t go about it with much finesse.

Throughout our conversation – did I mention this was all by phone? Yap, I’m a keeper… – she managed to express different amounts of hurt and disappointment, almost cut short our conversation once with a 'call me when you decide which religion to choose', said she thinks she failed me in instilling belief in me and eventually decided she isn’t that bothered by the whole thing, pending further discussion; which let me tell you, I can’t wait for (imagine me saying that in sarcastic tones).

I did learn a few things about my mother and her beliefs during that conversation, and weirdly enough was probably as revealing for me as it was for her. We had never before spoke with such candor about this subject, and ultimately I’m glad I did, but boy, was I going through the most colorful range of feelings while doing so. Since I am dramatically empathic when I’m experiencing a powerful feeling, imagining what she must feel like worked as a kick in the gut, and left me drained of all energy for the day. I literally felt like after a good 2h workout when hanging up the phone, 20minutes after it rang.

So yes, now I can understand what coming out of the closet feels like, even if it’s actually a bookshelf where you keep your Thomas Henry Huxley and Bertrand Russell’s books…