I came out to our neighbor

I can’t believe there’s still so many intense conversations to be had!  Why does it take forever?!

In general in our neighborhood, my spouse and I don’t have a rapport with people.  Like, at best, I watched our next-door neighbor’s cat one time, and we went to a backyard fire at her place twice, like two summers ago.

We also have a neighbor a few houses down who borrows our lawn mower a lot.  This is the guy I’m talking about today – I ran into him yesterday, off our street.

I was walking on a major road nearby, to a coffee shop to write some letters to friends.  (I am still out of work on medical leave right now.)  He saw me first, from across the street.  We probably have only seen each other once or twice since last summer.  He’s always super friendly, so he was shouting, “Hey, hey, how are you?” and crossing the street at the same time.  I steeled myself (slightly), and returned the greeting, meeting him partway to shake his hand and ask how he’s been, what he was up to.

He was walking home after buying his lotto tickets, etc. but that’s neither here nor there.  We talked about past neighbors that he’s kept up with, and about his plans for retirement.  I told him my spouse was going back to school in the fall for a master’s program.  (Oh, hey, PS: blog-friends, my spouse is doing this big thing coming up.  Grad school!!!)

Then I told him that I legally changed my name to Kameron.  And that I got my passport and driver’s ID and everything changed over.  He asked me if this was a good thing, and I said, yeah, yeah it is.  Then I realized he just has no idea, so I spelled it out – I said, “I’m transgender, I’m actually more in the middle, not like I am going to become a man.  But like, at work and my friends and family, I use male pronouns, ‘he/him/his.'”

He started to get it then, and as soon as he did, he started apologizing.  For being invasive, or something, I guess?  I just kept repeating, “No, you’re fine.  It’s not personal.  This is a part of who I am.  So, like my parents are all good with it, everyone’s all good.  It just took me a long time.  There’s a lot of discrimination.  Like, say, fifteen years ago, it wasn’t even OK just to be gay.  Things are changing though.”

He definitely got that.  It immediately sunk in.  He said, “Oh yeah, like you might have been depressed and now things are better for you?  I bet people deal with suicides and stuff, right?”  I said “Yes, and even bullying and hate crimes and everything.  It’s bad.  I mean, I don’t like to be negative, but yeah, it can be bad.”

He then proceeded to ask about operations and surgeries, and I just said, “Well, that part of it is personal.  So, I mean, I’ll figure that out as it comes.  But for now everything is all good.”  He does not need to know about my top-surgery status or anything else of that nature, for sure!

He started apologizing again, haha.

I shook his hand again and said he was free to borrow our lawn mower if he needs it.  We exchanged more pleasantries and parted ways.  I felt really good about it.  He kept referring to my spouse as my girlfriend, but hey, I can’t correct the man on every little detail.  He got the gist of the most important stuff for now, and that’s more than fine by me!  It felt like another tiny weight lifted off.  Dang, how much extra “weight” am I actually carrying?!  That’s still a mystery that is becoming just a little bit clearer…