Coming out and Quitting

My two-part news for the Facebook/Blog Reading World

Part 1 : I'm gay!  well, bisexual, does that count? Yes, it's going to count because it needs to count in my country today.

Part 2 : I'm quitting Kettlebell Sport.

Any family members that I couldn't reach my email, let me know if you're going to disown me so I won't try to contact you. Everyone who wants to unfriend me, go ahead and do it. I'm certainly going to keep using and writing about kettlebells for fitness, but not likely to write much about KBSport, so maybe you want to unsubscribe? Do what you want.

About Part 1 :  it was not a spontaneous realization. I don't think sexual orientation can be. 

Rewind way back to 1993. I was attending college at Ft. Lewis in Durango, CO. It was the beginning of my self-discovery so yoga naturally played a part. After one particularly heart-opening class I had a complete identity shift and came out as bisexual. I attended PFLAG meetings on campus and went to Gay Night a few times. Though I did meet women who were interested in me, I was only half out of the closet, and not able to remain vulnerable in the discovery process. They passed me by. I started dating a man which rolled into more relationships with men and just became my pattern. Then I had a follow-up crisis of figuring out that I was not in school for the right subject. Drama and psychology was just a guess. I didn't know myself well enough to finish either degree. I withdrew from college and started a quest to find my calling. Easy to shelf the question of sexuality at this point.

Forward to 2008 at the point when my marriage was dissolving. I had my certification to practice Shiatsu, was building my client base in Crestone, CO, and trying to keep in touch with the clients I'd left in Boulder, CO, was active with martial arts (aikido) and was married to a guy who also was bisexual (his last relationship was with a man). I was bought-in to the purpose of our union - to create a healing center. He had moved us to Crestone to get that started. We met the local Native American Church soon after visiting town. My true prayer was still unfocussed, but I knew this was the place I needed to be (the fire ceremony had emerged in my art therapy in 1996). Three years of fairly regular sweat lodge and peyote ceremonies later it became clear that I was deep in hiding. When during a ceremony I allowed the realization that the marriage was not going to live up to its promise the divorce cascaded into reality. I returned to Boulder to rebuild my practice but had left unresolved the question of sexual orientation, which had been knocking on my consciousness in ceremonies all the while. I still felt terrified of my attraction to women and could not break down my ego to explore it further. Again, the trauma of divorce, relocation and poverty became more important.

About Part 2 : you may know I started playing Kettlebell Sport just before my dad died in 2011 and achieved a high level quickly. Suddenly I was a role-model in the sport and inspiring other women to go beyond their perceived possibilities. It was great to be acknowledged, but after a few years the sport was taking over my life. I wanted to expand my Shiatsu training but was giving all my physical and financial resources to the sport. I had absolutely no energy for an intimate relationship, but was putting out gestures with online dating that I wanted a boyfriend. Amusingly, my image was very masculine, there was no interest coming back from men. When women did "vibe" me I felt threatened and confused. My mind was stuck in the "heterosexual" marriage reality. Trauma does powerful things to our minds.

My knees spoke on behalf of my body in Spring of last year, exploding into tremendous inflammation. This has been the subject of my most recent blog posts. It has taken more than a year of bodywork and diet modifications to heal them and peel the injury back to a bad ankle sprain that happened in 1992 while rock climbing. I lifted and competed through the injury. I recently started running again, which was the point at which I thought I would be able to get back into a training cycle. The enthusiasm of coming back in a big way was the entire fuel for the plan to prepare for the big World Championship in California next February. I already knew it would be my last competition "for a while". 

And then the Native American Church showed up here in Boulder.

The ceremony was on September 15th, a Women Only event with the purpose of healing relationships among women and strengthen the community. My prayer had two very clear parts: How can I completely heal my legs? How can I heal my relationship with women? We all saw lightning flash in the distance just before going into the tipi.

During the night the medicine brought me out of a deep sleep. 

First I heard a clear voice telling me "I know how you can heal your legs but you're not going to like it." It took half the night for me to entertain the idea that life will continue without KBSport. I sobbed. Then I felt that familiar nudge on my mind about how shut down I had become physically. I thought for a while it was because of the exhaustion of training and finally realized I had been suppressing my body's response to women. Somewhere in the night a voice from outside my mind said "Coming out does not change who you are."

Starting on Sept. 16th stopped lifting Kettlebell Sport. I grieved this change for a week. 

I haven't really known what to do about coming out as bi, but know that if I don't make it known through the public forum that I do have I will just stay under the guise of Single Heterosexual out of default. The thing I know for sure is that my body has got the lead.

That's my story. I offer it to my blog readers as explanation for my Gay Pride profile picture, and the story of why I'm not going to play Kettlebell Sport anymore.

Thanks to everyone for your support and encouragement for my writing all this time,

Christian

At the end of the night, this is how our altar looked. The cracks are very unusual!