how to come out

Upon realizing what you've actually known since you were three, you will insist to everyone and  their mom that you will come out to them—next week. When your mom mentions your new  label in a hole-in-the-wall sushi restaurant, you will declare a little too loudly that you're "NOT  OUT AS LESBIAN YET," relishing the feeling of queerness embodied by the label on your  tongue. You will remember third grade, how your heart seemed to grow wings and fly out of your  body whenever you saw another girl. How you would have given anything to say, in a restaurant of all places, that you weren't out as lesbian yet. You will view your failure to modulate your  voice as a homage to the awkwardness on your eight-year-old self's face. Once your  embarrassment wears off, you will resolve to make a big gay scene in every restaurant you set  foot in, starting tonight, to honor the scared baby-queer you were. A few days or eternities later,  you will sit on a friend's bed, watch her cat easily take up a third of said bed, confide in her (and  her cat) about your plan to come out in exactly ten days. She will tell you that it's not National  Coming Out Day yet, but you literally just came out to her. She will promise to send you  shocked emojis when you come out, and when it's actually National Coming Out Day and you  text her, she will. And after she does, you will spend the day copying and pasting texts, listening  to people tell you they already knew, changing the background on every profile picture from the  bi to the lesbian flag. It will be painful, but by the end of the day the weight of compulsory  heterosexuality will fall off your shoulders; the last shreds of the closet will no longer cling to  your soul. When you text the friend who couldn't believe that you hadn't come out yet, the way  her Memoji mouth hangs open will memorialize the days when you told your friends you were  bisexual, despite knowing in your queer soul that you'd never been attracted to a boy and didn't  even really want to be. You will honor your bi self by continuing to make the occasional bi pun,  reminding yourself on the daily that, like every beautiful thing, lesbian has bi in it.