The brighter and darker sides of opening up

I have noticed how willing I am to talk about what is happening to me with my "real world" friends.  The first one I talked about my shopping adventure was actually Janice, even if we have not yet officially ended our disagreement.  It's not that I wanted to tell it specifically to her, but I wanted to talk about it the day after I met the selesman and she was the first I met on MSN Messenger.

I figured that since she's a girl, she would love to gossip about i anyways and that it would be good for our "friendship".  I told her what happened, but she rapidly had to leave, but I told her that she could talk about it to Jack.

During the week, I really wanted to talk about it to Jack and I was even mad when I couldn't go as far as I wanted (because of various restrictions).  Luckily, I could finally meet him last Sunday and I got to tell him all the story from beginning to the fact that I had discovered that my salesman had a girlfriend and that I still wanted to try to meet Prospect #1.

I really surprised myself at how easy for me it was to tell all this and also mostly how much I wanted to simply talk about it.  Only a few months ago I would have thought that I would have wanted to keep my crush a secret.  But it is not the case at all.  That is definitely something positive in my life at the moment.

A less positive aspect of my life at the moment is actually not happening to me.  The thing is that I open up on the chat room too and I meet new friends.  So far so good!  I get to talk about myself and my friends talk about themselves.  However, for two of them, they're having real hard times right now.  I believe they are way too hard on themselves and I try to convince them that they are good people.  But it's really hard to do simply by chat.  By opening up to them, they have opened up to me, but I can't help them the way they need to be helped and that saddes me.  I wish I could be beside them and give them big huggs, but it is not possible.  There's an imbalance between my opening up and my ability to help people and it's hard to manage.

Finally, on a more positive note, I came out to one of my coworkers today.  I invited her for lunch and I told her I was gay in the parking of the restaurant before entering.  Her reaction was: "What, is it only that you wanted to tell me?"  (When I invited her, I told her I wanted to explain her why I had been weird sometimes in the past).  My answer was that no, it's not only that I wanted to tell her, but it was the explanation of my weird behavior from the fall of 2011.  She had noticed how weird I was around the time I came out to my parents, so I was happy to finally tell her what had been going on.

We had a really good lunch together, it was really fun to talk about my life to her and she was really happy for me to accept who I am and she was also happy that I simply told her.  I told her about the whole shopping "situation" and that I do want to be in a relationship.  We also talked about the next girl I want to come out to at work before "spilling the beans" to everyone.  We talked about how I could tell her and it was really funny. It's the girl I have already mentioned who has a fixation about gays, so we had a lot of material to find out how I could tell her I'm gay.

Maybe tomorrow I'll go back to the store for more "shopping adventures" and a scarf!!  I hope something positive can come out of it.