This twosome from the Beatles on Abbey Road is possibly my favorite Beatles “song.” It’s an emotional punch of sentimentality as well as hope – and will always have a huge bit of memory for me. I was listening to it once while walking to work in NYC. I think I had gotten off the NY Waterway bus as something must have pissed me off about that day’s commute? Anyway, the headphones were on and I had this on and it gets to the “Carry That Weight” portion of the song, and that’s when I realized it was beyond time to be out at work. I hadn’t explicitly told anyone besides Arielle and Joe at that point, and while I’m sure most of my coworkers were quite sure about my sexuality, I still kept myself in a closet of sorts. Who knows why? It’s just when you are still afraid of being rejected by coworkers/friends (for clearly no real rational reason), you can decide to put up dumb walls.
So hearing these lyrics from “Carry That Weight” resonated like hell with me that day. I was carrying an enormous weight of keeping this “a secret” and it was draining me. Especially since there was so much additional stress of the job alone! So yeah, that day at work, I was ready to stop evading any questions. I still remember that for lunch, I had gone downstairs to the Rockefeller Plaza concourse to get a chicken katsu plate at the sushi place downstairs and the very friendly staff there yet again tried to sell me on the wonders of Jesus Christ. I nodded politely and sat down to wait and messaged Sharon that it was hilarious that I was getting proselytized yet again at the sushi place as they’d probably flip out if they knew I was gay. She ‘lol’d’ via the message and then pointed out that I had just come out to her. She was happy, I was happy, and that’s that. It really is a miraculous weight to remove when you do that. After that, it was never an issue and never a problem to talk about my actual life. Just remembering how that felt and then remembering having to not have a personal life while in the Air Force still makes me cringe. What a waste.