Page 5 - Well, I Guess I’m Out Now

(Music fades in)

Oh hi! I’m MJ Bailey, and I write things. Sometimes. It doesn’t mean I always know what to write, but hey, we’ll get there. I guess.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

But okay, I am in the rare position as a writer that I get to use my craft almost constantly. I work in grant writing in my day job with a sprinkle of communications and policy documents therein, I write and produce fiction podcasts, and then there are the slew of other projects I have running. These projects include a moderately successful streaming gig on Twitch.Tv. It’s a long list of things that make up my daily life. Also of which involve writing. And it can be hard to juggle at times, but one of the things that has helped me greatly (whether or not it should) has been to keep my life as compartmentalized as possible. My creative and professional lives have up until this point between two parallel lines that cannot touch.

But there was always a third line. It was part of my personal life, namely those connections from my young years, those threads I have held onto both for nostalgia and for my mother’s sake. Many of them are her friends, after all. These are the people who keep her company, specifically there are people from my childhood parish who watched me grow up. This category of people, I tend to associate with my professional life because those are the updates they are getting. I don’t tell them who I date or what’s happening in my social life. When friends get married and I’m in their town, I often side step the specifics of all that. Why? Because I am not out to them.

Personally, I identify as bisexual, but that’s not a thing I often say. The friends who know were there when I realized this about myself a bit later than most do (thanks grief for delaying that one), and there are many people in my life who don’t care enough about the specifics to require me to say it. But in realizing this about myself and having to figure out how to navigate these conversations, I’ve decided that on the whole I can’t, and it’s better to not say anything.

And look, I understand the approach of just saying “Damn them” and going about my way. Say it, and if they react, that’s on them. In some sense, I have done that. The silence can be a “damn them.” The silence is a withdrawal that I can live with. It’s a withdrawal that comes with minimal damage. And by damage, I don’t just mean my lost relationships and connections. Nostalgia can be a hell of a drug, but I recognize how some relationships–especially those you cannot authentically be yourself in–are often not worth keeping. I recognize that coddling is often not the best approach for a situation like this. But that focuses the discussion on what’s best for me. Personally, I still have to think about my mom.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

For reference, I did have that “coming out” conversation with my mom who was not surprised when I told her but seemed to be mentally preparing herself for me to get rejected twice as often now that the dating pool was larger. (And no, she wasn’t wrong about that). But to her, accepting someone you care about for all that they are is somewhat of a no brainer. She can’t understand why someone wouldn’t. And that’s the part of the conversation that always goes awry. Because she does want to share the good things in my life with everyone who watched me grow up, with her friends from work, from church, and the random people she has met at the grocery store, but when it comes to dates and partners, knowing that she’ll be rebuked, especially at a church she loves so dearly, is a very hard thing for me to sit with.

I know she’s a grown woman who can make her own choices, but I’m a grown woman who doesn’t want to feel like the worst thing that ever happened to my mother. So we are at impasse.

Besides who WANTS their childhood dentist to know that they have a new girlfriend especially when that girlfriend will dump them in four months to hook up with the bartender from the restaurant where you had your first date. I hate that I can say that happened to me. And who WANTS the priest from their childhood church to know about the time a girl broke your heart so bad, you tried to dye your hair blonde not realizing that your dark hair needs to be bleached not dyed if you want to go on to a lighter shade. Honestly, that one kind of saved me.

There is a degree of mess here that I am more than happy to keep to myself. And up until recently, that’s been fine. Awkward at times but fine.

But last year, my first book came out, and in the general writing, editing, formatting stress I didn’t look over certain walls or past certain boxes that I keep my work within. Namely, I didn’t think about how much I keep my personal projects out of those spaces as well.

Which is odd. I would think this would be something I’d have to be more aware of because in addition to constant fights with my mother about which parts of my dating left she shares with other people, we’ve also had debates about who can listen to my fiction podcasts. Why? Queer people.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

I’ve prided myself on writing the sort of things I want to read rather than things that are organized nicely. I’ve prided myself on bucking convention when I could. My go to example of that is writing an audio fiction podcast in second person, but that same podcast also features a few queer relationships (depending on how one interprets certain characters).

To many in traditional media spaces, queer relationships can be a bit of a gamble. You can almost guarantee that you will alienate a portion of your audience who will object to that on some perceived moral grounds, but you can’t guarantee that more people will come in to fill those seats. In fact, you have no data to go off of at all because no one’s ever tried it. So you would have to think about the millions of dollars you’re putting on the line. How do you justify that when pay off is so uncertain?

And if that seems reasonable to you, if it seems inevitable that queer fiction cannot take off because of patterns in various industries, then the consequences are also inevitable, specifically that it will be harder for those stories to ever come into existence. No one will take the chance on them, and so they won’t receive the sort of support they need to come into existence. If they do not come to be, then they can never, as a category, be successful, and if  they can never, as a category, be successful, then no one will be willing to take that chance.

See, there’s a power then in picking mediums that don’t require you to get outside approval: spaces like podcasting and self-publishing where I have been free to act as I have and write whatever I would like to write. It’s challenging, to be sure. I don’t have built in structure to support my work, but I also don’t have those roadblocks either. It’s a balance I would never blame another creator for not wanting to strike. But as I’ve charged through, jugging all of my many hats, I’ve not stopped to think about how telling people about this book isn’t quite the same as outing myself, but it is close enough. It would be a grand reveal, a confession to how I view the world: i.e. that there are gay, nonbinary, and trans people who deserve to exist and have full, fulfilling lives. That I believe this to be. That I want to imagine a world that way.

That shouldn’t be a revelation to the people around me. Many of them already suspect that I believe this. I just haven’t formally said it because admittedly my first instinct is to protect my mother. But now that she can’t share a huge achievement with those people, I don’t think I’m protecting her anymore. I think the mess of my life is starting to come out. I think that’s why I tried to keep everything nice and organized, I was only organizing one section, one view of the full shelf. But with that book, that illusion has come apart. It has fallen to pieces, and I cannot hope to pull it back together. Nor should I. 

My mom certainly never asked me to. It was just easier that way, especially with it just being me and her. But I have other friends. My mom always liked my friends. So maybe it just needs to be a new day.

But with that, I’m MJ Bailey, and I’m a writer, I guess. Whatever that means.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The Writer’s Open Book is a podcast from Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, and produced by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. The logo was made by Keldor777 on Twitch. And to the Queen of Cups in my life, you know who you are, thank you for helping me process so much of this writing journey and for all the support. I couldn’t have done it without you.