It’s National Coming Out Day, but I don’t want to talk about coming out, or at least the whole process of it. I want to talk about being gay.

It’s actually quite boring.

I put my pants on one leg after the other, brush my teeth more cavalierly than my dentist would like, butter my toast with abandon. I worry about my midsection, paying my bills, and the state of the world, but will full-on belly laugh if someone pronounces “dicks” just right. I have a system when shopping the grocery store (don’t make me veer from it), and I can’t carry a tune to save my life.

Everyday, I get to kiss my wonderfully goofy, brainy, sensitive boyfriend good night, then goodbye every morning on my way to work. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, half-asleep with racing thoughts, I’ll turn to my left and kiss his shoulder. He’ll grunt, and I’ll fall back asleep.

Besides the boy-love stuff, how is any of this gay? Well, it’s not. Not really, because being gay is as normal as being straight, as breathing. It’s incidental to my life, as well as that of many millions of others.

Being out, though? Being open?

That, friends, is magical and wondrous and joyous.

Not long ago, the choice of being out was ostracization, and quite literally death, or the lighter life sentences of conformity and silence in the closet.

Fuck those times and the system that built it.

Praise the universe that today, choosing between the closet or being out is more akin to sitting quietly and coloring within the lines with only gray crayons, or saying “fuck you” to the quiet, flipping the table and ripping up the coloring book.

Being out – as a gay man, or a lesbian, or a trans man or trans woman, or asexual or bisexual – is like saying “fuck your crayons, and the primary colors, too, I’ve got my own fucking paint set. Fuck your lines, I’m coloring on the walls, dummy! With CHARTREUSE.” (My significantly quieter significant other would disagree with me here, but I digress.)

Everyday is a choice to say fuck you to shame, fuck you to bigotry, but also hell yes to living, hell yes to me.

Being gay is normal. The ups and downs, though sometimes more acute, are also normal. Coming out, being out, is spiritual and special, a full-body experience that you never really forget, and one that changes you for the better.

Featured image by Alysa Bajenaru