I'm out of the broom closet

Wow.  What an incredible day.  A lot of exchanges between the three of us, sharing where we are spiritually with complete acceptance and understanding.  Tom has absolutely no problem with my Paganism/Druidism and with Zach's Agnostic/Paganism. In fact he thought it made perfect sense for me to follow this path.  While he still thinks of himself as Christian he is also interested in divination and the study of ancient arts.

All this time I was afraid of his disapproval.  The Tarot told me last night to be more open with my secrets and I knew immediately it meant to out myself to Tom but I was adamant it wasn't going to happen.  As I suspected, he had a pretty good idea something Pagan was going on but didn't want to insist that I tell him.  Me talking about not going to church anymore opened the door but I was still afraid to walk through it.  He did encourage me but didn't insist.

The difference in the energy of the house is palpable.  You can feel so much negativity gone now.

I can now practice openly, talk about it openly and even share more with him spiritually.  There has been a barrier for a long time between us, mostly built by me due to the guilt I've been having for years about not believing.  I realize that I stopped believing when I wrote the Walk thru Bethlehem play and have been trying to pretend I still believed all these years.  It's taken its toll on me and forced me to live artificially.  And believing that Tom was a fundamentalist forced me to hide from him even more.  To be fair, and I think he will admit this, he's not always been approachable.  And neither have I.

Unfortunately I had a bit of a dust up with my older sister.  She's coming up next week and wants to get together.  She talked about being interested in my journey away from church and wanted to talk about it when she gets here.  She's been reading my mundane blog and saw that I was a bit pissed at her so she asked me if I didn't want to see her.  I said that as long as she was being reasonable, as she was during our facebook chat, I didn't have a problem with it.  Then she kept going on and on about how our parents were so glad I came down and how good it was to see us.  And how it did them good. The old guilt trip.

So I told her that I didn't appreciate everyone trying to fix me, that if something was wrong I would fix myself. That I didn't like her strong-arming (not how I phrased it at the time) tactics trying to manipulate me into going down there.  First she denied that's what she did.  She maintained that she was just making suggestions that the bus trip would get me to her house and how helpful she was planning on being to get me the rest of the way to our hometown.  I stuck to my guns that it was her prodding me, not suggesting, that she was using guilt to get me down there.  Then she said that it had been 3 years and they felt I needed to get down there.

So I told her that instead of telling me that my dad wanted to see me and letting me figure it out, she and Steph and talked about me and decided that this is what I needed to do so it wasn't a "suggestion" it was them deciding for me.

She never got it.

But then I mentioned that the entire trip consisted of Mom and Dad criticizing me, telling me what I needed to do to fix myself and then picking on Zach and she effectively hung up on me.  She said she didn't know what to say and went offline without saying anything else.

So it's been a great day...in a weird way.  I think it was the right thing to do to challenge Peg's notion that she's just trying to be helpful when in effect she's trying to manipulate and run my life.  On the other hand it was upsetting to go through.  But it was great to come out of the closet.  I even put my status on my facebook profile.  Not that anyone actually reads that.

But for now, I'm going to revel in the positive energy I feel going on here and get some supper cooked.

ETA:  For some reason blogger isn't accepting my comments and I don't know if anyone else has tried to comment either.  I posted twice and it showed up until I went back to the home page when it disappeared.  If it's not corrected by tomorrow I'll look into it.  Definitely frustrating.