Escaping Your Specific Closet

I've never been one to really care about peer pressure, but that's been mostly because I've never let anybody close enough to me to pressure me. I've never looked up to friends, so never felt desperate for their approval ... I understand it's not like this for everybody.

In school I was the quiet kid who fell in love with so many girls - never quite got around to telling them all - that I wasn't distracted by trivial things like friendship. Ok, I'm over-emphasising the point - I did have some great friends, but there were also plenty of times when I was 'between friends' and perfectly fine with that too.

So why that tragic bit of over-sharing? Just because it ties in with this video I'm about to share. We all go through some really confusing patches growing up, and it DOESN'T end in school ... it just keeps going. Why then do we frequently make it harder on ourselves than it really has to be, by trying to internalise some pain, or not having hard conversations we should be having?

Who better to share some amazing insights into hard conversations than this lesbian speaker at TEDx? Trust me, what she has to say will speak directly to you: Coming out of your closet: Ash Beckham at TEDxBoulder

Some key take-aways:

• "Hard is not relative. Hard is hard."
• "I think we all have closets. All the closet is, is a hard conversation."
• "Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they fell short. It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge they were trying. And what else can you ask someone to do, but try?"
• "Apologize for what you've done, but never who you are."

Thanks for that Ash. Another reminder in this plastic world that it's ok to feel.