i'm comin out

okay here we go uh-huh yep yes you read the title correctly there have been some changes going on in my personal life and i am oh my gosh i think i'm finally ready to tell you guys i just got so nervous i'm not straight oh and i'm going to get into label details in a second but first i just want to note that i've gotten a few comments over the last few years so you guys can tell that i seem more happy and confident and it makes me ridiculously proud and grateful that people can see that because i feel it and i've had just the overall life journey going on and i've just become more and more of myself and more and more confident and my sexuality is a huge part of that um so i feel like you guys have kind of like seen so much of the effects of me coming out but you haven't actually heard anything about it so that's what we're doing today that's what it's all about today we're celebrating i'm fully finally like completely letting people in i have been hiding for so much of my youtube channel in so many ways who remembers the voiceovers who remembers the only text for years and here i am today ready to come out it's a good time okay details i know you want them okay so for labels i would say that i am concretely non-concrete um labels that i use for myself often are bisexual queer and fluid i have experienced attraction to multiple genders in my life and that feels the most representative of what i have experienced but we're gonna get into my story so you understand a little bit more as well because there are some like details around that and i really understand if this feels like super new news i have always been very like feminine in my expression you guys have seen me be married like i get it but i have been this way the entire time you've known me i've been at various levels of accepting that for myself but the me that you've come to know over years and years and years is still very much here you've already seen the effects of me coming out so i'm not a different person i just have a facet you didn't know about before and it's very important to me and i do want to share that story if i've learned anything in my time opening up on the internet it's that anytime we open up and we are brave we allow others to open up and be brave and that's something that i'm very dedicated to so i'm gonna really try to be brave and vulnerable here it's gonna be hard but we're gonna do it so here's the story so to set the scene i grew up in a really conservative environment and i was homeschooled so my circle was pretty small and i didn't know anything about gay or queer people until middle school in that span of time before i was 12 or 13 years old i definitely had crushes on boys uh my mom's kitchen table still has the initials of my first crush carved into it sorry mom but another part of my experience and i didn't have words for it but i noticed starting around like eight or nine that i would feel differently towards some girls than others my biggest memory of this time because it kept happening right but my biggest memory was this new year's eve party and there was this girl there from out of town i only ever saw her at that party but guys i was mesmerized i didn't know it then but it was a full rom-commie moment like she walked in the door my jaw dropped i thought she was the most beautiful thing i'd ever seen i wanted to be near her i wanted to hug her i wanted to tell her how beautiful she was it was so distinct that that memory stayed in my mind until now um and that situation and ones like it would repeat in my head and i'd be like what is that about i don't get it um and that's just kind of how i live my life i didn't feel bad about it i didn't feel wrong and i was just living my life so then age 12 i um i'm already getting nervous i was on this homeschool field trip and there was this boy that had just learned the word homo and he would not stop saying it and eventually i was just like what in the heck is this dude talking about so i turned to an adult and i was like um hi what is a homo what it what is this thing you don't look me in the eye and told me it's when a man feels for a man the way he's supposed to feel for a woman i think my face probably looked shocked and they said yeah that's correct it's disgusting it is the biggest sin that you can commit you will absolutely go to hell if you do it and i was aghast my sweet little brain did not make the connection that girls could be homo that was the only word i knew at the time and i don't know i heard a lot about really terrible sins that would send you to hell and so i filed that one away as like a special guy problem and kept going with my life maybe a year later i think i was 13 at this point my friend and i were talking about the new meaning of the word gay and um she mentioned the term lesbian and i was like oh well that's a funny word what's lesbian and she was like oh it's when girls and i was like when girls what and i was so obtuse she kept like trying to hint and i wasn't getting the hint until she finally had to like look me in the eyes and be like haley it's when girls like girls and i was like oh and in my mind to say that a light bulb went off would be an actual understatement like i was like that's what those feelings were i get it now of course i liked those girls that's what liking somebody feels like and that was the first half of the second after i heard about girls liking girls and in the second half of the sentence i remembered what i've been taught about gay and queer people and i realized i'm one of them because of what i've been taught i was like i am a despicable human i'm like a murderer me a 13 year old girl just like what do i do and the only answer i had was shh don't tell anybody ever no one can know this this needs to be buried as deep inside of you as it possibly can be it needs least never see the light of day you have to take this to your grave and just generally my way of silencing myself was to be like okay this goes in the background of your brain you are never allowed to think about it you are never allowed to talk about it you are not allowed to experience it this dies in your brain we're continuing on through high school here like that's the background that's happening in the back of my brain in the foreground i'm dealing with undiagnosed depression and anxiety which i had even before my sexuality mystery revealed itself to me and i knew that i thought and felt differently just in general about the world than the community that i was in at the time and the hard part about that was that like it was conform or be ostracized it was be this person or you will be kicked out very much felt like i couldn't be any of the things that i was because any of the things that i was meant that i would lose everything i would lose love i would lose belonging i would lose my community i would lose my family and i prayed i pleaded with god please take away all the ways that i'm different this is too hard i am doing everything i can and i still keep having these feelings and they won't go away and i'm not strong enough just please please take it back to a point that i'm strong enough and i'll do i'll do whatever i have to do just please take it away and nothing changed so i believed that god had given up on me and god didn't think that i was even worth trying to save i wasn't even worth being loved and i do hate that for past me and i need to put a note in here in case anybody's feeling any of those things that humans are innately valid and valuable and anybody or system or thing that tries to tell you differently is wrong it's not true and you don't have to listen to that so that's how i felt just generally 15 years of my life that was it i kept going forward trying to be as straight as i possibly could i had my high school crushes in college i dated i had one little relationship actually tried not to be friends with girls in college because i was afraid that i would end up falling for one of my girlfriends and that couldn't happen friends that were girls obviously um like with terror in my soul that couldn't happen and when i look back it's amazing how isolated i was it's amazing how much of this was just in my own head it was a struggle that nobody else knew about which meant that i had nobody to help me and it helps me have a little compassion for how hard that was against my plans i did end up coming out to the guy that i would eventually marry i had heard him repeat a lot of the things that we had heard in church about gay and queer people and i realized that i was way more scared of letting him propose to me and then marrying him and then him somehow finding out and then leaving me i was way more scared of that than just telling him and letting me leave him now so i blurted it out in the car one day and was like it's fine it's fine like i'm bisexual which means that i can just ignore the girl side of things and only ever date boy that's what we're gonna do he was never fully supportive of my sexuality um i think the best thing i can say is he tolerated it and shrugged it off and we were married less than a year later i think the next big point in my story happens in 2015 um i've talked about that breakdown in several videos um and i've talked about different facets of it that feeling that i had in me of being worthless and unlovable for years and years and years and years just destroyed me from the inside out and trigger warning here's a safe time to go to if you need it um i realized that i i wasn't going to make it if something didn't change either the caylee that invalidated and harmed and hated herself was gonna go or my entire life was gonna go and so i dragged myself into therapy and it was the best thing i've ever done and i started healing i found brene brown's work on shame and vulnerability and i realized that shame had been eating me alive for most of my life that's an understatement and i started slowly reclaiming myself i was fighting back enough to have some life inside my empty shell and i realized as part of that if i was going to remove shame from my life i had to confront the shame i had around my sexuality and my way of doing that at the time was to let myself think about it for the first time and like really think about my label and really think about where i felt like i was and i really truly felt like i was bisexual still do um and i was like okay i'm a bisexual woman in a straight marriage that's fine i do feel like i need to tell other people that are close to me because i it's the same thing like i just need to know they won't leave me because they know and so i told two three maybe four people and that was it like i kind of just like was in limbo there for a few years where i was like okay like i had worked through enough stuff to survive but i wasn't thriving and then we get to 2018 which is when i left my then husband and i'm sure a lot of you guys are wondering if that has anything to do with my sexuality it really doesn't um that does happen for people and it's a totally valid story it's just not mine um i left that marriage because i realized that i had been gaslit and manipulated and abused for years and the only way that i was ever really going to thrive and live was if i got out of that situation because the years prior that i'd been struggling in the situation that i got in in 2015 it was not apart from the abuse that i'd been enduring and so i knew i needed to get out and it sounds resolute but it was the first time i'd ever asserted myself and it was difficult and it was clunky and it was the best thing i did ever even more than therapy i guess couldn't have happened without it but you know and it's taken me until now to be brave enough to call that relationship what it was and it's important for me to do that today because i realized that staying silent and afraid meant that somebody else owned my story and i'm no longer willing for that to be the case for me today's about owning my story all of it but more importantly for me today's about celebrating my story and i think it's time to get to that part more recent viewers probably know this one um i moved back to north carolina to be around my family and friends that were out here and the amount of healing that i found being in a loving and supportive environment was overwhelming i had been so convinced of how small and weak and ineffective i was as a human i felt like failure was etched into my bones i felt like i couldn't actually understand reality without a translator i felt like i didn't deserve control of my life because i would mess it up and getting on my own and getting away from voices that told me that voice that told me that oh it melted away slowly and it was not the easiest thing but with siblings and friends and my therapist i started dismantling all these terrible stories i've been given about myself like all this foreground stuff right and i started realizing the things that i thought i had to hide about myself and be embarrassed about for myself like being silly and goofy emotive passionate cautious all these things that i thought that i had to hide that made me like undesirable i started pulling out and like being able to enjoy for the first time and realize that i didn't have to be embarrassed of myself and i didn't have to be embarrassed to be any of those things and as i started to unwind those stories i started to find comment threads and the common threads taught me what gaslighting and bullying voices sound like and with that knowledge i started to realize that my entire dialogue about my sexuality was gaslighting and bullying it was just all these internalized messages that i'd gotten around my sexuality from people growing up and from church and from mainstream media from all this stuff and i had internalized it and i was using it to gaslight and bully myself i was using it to hurt myself and with the help of friends siblings therapists i started to bring my sexuality into the forefront and they were unanimous that i needed to figure out what this whole attraction to girls thing was that i could not get into a long-term relationship with a guy unless i knew and i was resistant i was like guys guys no no that shame mode it is too wide and too deep and too full of crocodiles for me to ever cross let's just put that on a shelf i can't it's too much i'm too scared but the thing about recognizing shame gaslighting and bullying is that it becomes a lot harder to shame gaslight and bully yourself into silence and one day it was like turn on a dime i don't know how it happened to be just this distinct but i just had one day where i was like i am done with this i am not treating myself like this anymore i have worked way too hard to take people like this out of my life i have worked way too hard to stop the gaslighting and bullying of myself and i am not going to be responsible for it and i am not going to let the voices of people that do not care about me belittle shame and berate me so hell no and my sweet little way of trying to dip my toe into the water was to get on dating apps and swipe around and chat and text and that was all i was comfortable with for a while it was very much like that scene in rapunzel after she gets quoting a disney movie after she gets out of the castle and she's like i'm free this is what grass feels like and then she's like i'm a despicable human oh my god and then yes i love that because i really think that my internalized homophobia yelled at me the most during that time it was brutal to say the least and then i ended up going on dates and that that's when it hit for me okay because i think i thought that this whole time i had been chasing some kind of like unnecessary spicy high with girls and what i found instead was that what i've been missing this whole time was connection just that like spark that just exists and like quiet and like still and even mundane moments and it the experience as a whole just dating it wasn't exotic or different or wild or lecherous or any of the things that i'd been taught to fear it just kind of fit and i just found that there was so much purity in truly emotionally connecting with somebody and it teaches you strength and like the whole experience just overall like we're like no one part of it it was just calm and wholesome and sweet it was all the things that i was trying to learn to be and i was like the stuff that i was taught to be afraid of and the stuff that i'm experiencing are two completely different things and i get how being attracted to someone of the same gender could feel wrong or weird if it's not your sexuality but it is mine and it is not wild or departurous or crazy it is calm sweet and nurturing and that's when for me i was like this is not what i thought it was and this is okay and i am okay and the freedom from that i don't know how to explain i think i had always thought of my brain as this like big empty warehouse that i and life filled up with stuff and i had this like wall like layers on layers only there's layers thick um between who i had to be and who i was and i for a while 20 almost 30 years i thought that was fine um i could live in this teeny tiny little space i didn't need to take up any more space i could chop off whole parts of myself to be who other people needed me to be until the walls came down and for the first time i like stretched my arms and i took like big steps and i was i could run and i could jump and i could spin and dance and i was like what this is what people can experience what was i doing because i didn't need to be in a cell i didn't need to be afraid and finally for the first time i could inhabit all of me oh and i finally got to realize what i wish i could have told 12 year old me that you are not a monster you are not a murderer you are a full human with a heart that is prismatic enough to love multiple genders and that is beautiful and for the first time in my life after hating myself and tearing myself apart and wanting absolutely nothing to do with myself i felt like i finally came home that was like 2019 and so over the past two-ish years i have found more beauty and strength in myself than i knew that i had being brave in that area of my life has allowed me to be brave in so many areas including the channel it makes me so happy that you guys have gotten to see me blossom into me it makes me so happy that i've been brave enough to try content that i was too afraid to make it makes me so happy that being brave in that area gave me more here with you and uh also i met somebody uh this summer we will have been dating for two years she is everything i never knew to hope for she teaches me every day what it looks like to be loved and seen and cared for i am in awe of her integrity and her strength i love her more than i know how to tell anybody and i'm so so grateful for the role that she plays in my life and so so grateful for all the healing that i've experienced with her by my side and after that story you can probably understand that i am not interested in putting myself in a very specific box i have not dated enough to know for sure exactly where on a spectrum i am i guess if we're only talking binary genders we've got girls and guys i'm probably about here i'm more into girls than guys theoretically open to both i know this entire conversation has been very binary for me um that's how i've experienced my sexuality um but that is not comprehensive of the full spectrum of gender that exists and to all my non-binary gender fluid uh agender plus pals out there i love you and i am so supportive and respectful of your journey um but yeah bisexual queer fluid in me and i'm sure you're wondering like does this actually change anything on the channel we have made a whole video on this now but is anything changing i use my girlfriend as a guinea pig for hair experiments a lot and i would like to share the results of those experiments i i will probably vlog from home now aside from that no i'm still a hair channel i'm still obsessed with hair i'm not gonna hide anything because why would i but like i'm still kaylee melissa i still do what i do i still love what i love this is just a new face that you just didn't know about before i want to say thank you to you guys for spending this time with me and listening to my story i want to say thank you for your support and i want to say thank you for being here through all the highs and lows and i'm so hopeful and excited for all the highs ahead but that being said that is it for today's video whether you're old or new or a casual lurker thank you for spending time with me i am still your friendly neighborhood hairstylist and i'll see you in the next video bye [Music] okay cool cool cool cool cool cool gonna go cry somewhere now take a tequila shot and cry and hug my girlfriend goodbye

2021-03-14 14:35

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