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When I joined LL for the first time about five years ago, it was a shocking experience for me. Talking about my sexual orientation out loud (well, typing it, but you get the idea) was life changing. For the next year or two I was somewhat obsessive about it. I spent untold hours in LL, BC, and other forums. Somewhere in that time I also became a vol at LL. I had to consciously limit myself at one point to around six hours a week of running the room to make sure that I still got out and did other things with my life. I was passionate about this cause, even as I was terrified and an emotional mess. Somewhere in the intervening years though, it all just became... normal. Having a kid definitely accelerated the process because of the time demands of raising an infant. But the truth is it happened before that. I still logged into LL for a scheduled session for two hours most weeks, and a few hours sometimes outside of that too. But to a large degree the whole BL thing just kind of faded into the background. Which in a way I suppose is a good thing. It's a sign that I had truly made my peace with my sexual orientation and started moving on with my life. I remember as I went through the emotional turbulence of the whole thing thinking to myself "give it time, and this will feel normal". And with time it did. Then last weekend I went to the B4U-ACT conference. The whole thing was a wild experience. There were over 40 MAPs in attendance from a wide range of backgrounds. There were young people, old people. Registrants who had done time and people with squeaky clean records. Exclusive MAPs and non-exclusive MAPs with only passing attraction to minors and everything in between. Several MAPs in attendance were living lives to varying degrees in the open about being MAPs. Several of the MAPs were themselves trained therapists. I remember one night when I was having a conversation with an MAP therapist about my work in LL. He asked what the most monumental thing I have experienced is, and I replied "the suicides". I recounted to him some of the stories I know of chatters who have killed themselves, or tried to. He was taken aback, and asked me "how do you handle that?" I told him that I try to help, and that's all I can do. But that isn't really true. The truth is that I simply don't handle it. I just compartmentalise it and ignore it, as I have been doing to varying degrees with minor attraction my whole life starting with when I was a young teenager and I tried to convince myself that this was all a fleeting attraction that I could just ignore if I focused on my (very fleeting) attraction to women. I was a bit of a wreck on the flight home,. Going about my daily life the next day as if nothing ever happened was hard. I'm sure that with time this feeling too will fade and it will once again all be normal. But in a way I don't want it to be normal this time. I don't know if I want to keep going back to compartmentalising this and shoving it over to the margins, going about my life as if nothing happened. Several of the MAPs there where open with there friends and family about there minor attraction. I don't think that would be a good choice for me (at least for a now) given my family and life circumstances. The ones who I spoke too about it all conceded that they had paid a price for not hiding. But I do envy and admire them for it, and several said that they don't regret it. It's been a few days now, and I do feel like I am at least emotionally collected again. I am going to contact B4U-ACT and try to take on some more work. I've been circling with becoming more active on some projects over there for a year or two, and now that my kid is out of the newborn stage I don't really have a good excuse. I'm hoping that this time some of the energy sticks with me better. We'll see. |