Today is National Coming Out Day.

 I was only ever frightened once. I was nervous coming out to my parents, but by that point I’d been in college for half a year, gotten a girlfriend, come out to professors. It no longer felt unnatural to say it: I like girls. And also by that time the truth was crashing forward like waves running up a beach, like the tide, and all I did was yield to the inevitable rush of water, let myself be carried like foam. And yes, perhaps I was afraid, but it was a fear that washed through me and away.

Not like the night I said it for the first time, out loud, two months after I kissed a girl who was not Cristina, the one who made me wonder and who I still don’t know if I wanted as friend or lover, and so avoided saying something that would pin me down. But by my senior year I knew, and knowing makes you want to tell, it pressures you like being underwater does, makes you feel like rising to the open air.

And so I turned my face up to the surface. The problem was that the girl I most wanted to tell – someone I loved, respected, admired, certainly one of my best friends in this small town – was the person I least wanted to lose. And I was terrified I would. It took all night to tell her, and I shook the whole time, because I was forcing the words out, struggling to reveal myself like the way a swimmer struggles when they’re down too far and in too deep, straining upwards towards sunlight, towards oxygen.

I shook so hard that she told me later, I thought you were going to tell me you were dying. It was that bad. I was that scared. I remember lying curled in on myself, tremors all through my body, facing the wall, and all I needed to say and all I said was just I’m gay. And then tears, salt like the sea, as she stared at me and said, That’s all? I thought something was really wrong. Relief, like water quenching thirst. I spent an hour crying and explaining, the words coming easy, and each one was easier to speak. The fear ebbing. By the next week I had come out – much more quietly – to all my high school friends, and no one was anything but supportive, amused that it had taken me this long.

When I talk of coming out I talk of water. Being in the closet feels like drowning. The same panic, the inability to breathe. And coming out is like rising to the surface, and riding the waves to shore, where you can stand and know that you are free. And finally draw breath.