The first week of being out

I am walking down Smith Street on a Wednesday at lunchtime, eleven days after the kids found out and four days after the last of my close friends got a phone call, and I notice halfway down the block that I am breathing differently. Not deeper. Just freer. Like a belt I had been wearing without realising had come undone an hour ago. The footpath is the same footpath. The pho place still has the same queue. I am the same height. Something in my body has nonetheless dropped its shoulders, and is keeping them dropped, and it is not going back.

This is what the first week of being out is actually like. Not a parade. Not a collapse. A weather change inside your own ribcage that nobody on the street can see.

The relief is the surprise

Everyone warns you about the fear. Almost nobody warns you about the relief, and the relief is, in the first week, the dominant note. Bigger than the fear by a factor of three or four. It is also disorienting, because you have spent eight or nine months bracing for the worst, and when the worst does not arrive on the timetable you assigned to it, the body does not know what to do with the unspent adrenaline.

The relief shows up as physical things first. Sleep that lasts the whole night. A jaw that is not, on waking, already clenched. The shoulder you had been carrying up around your ear for a year, the one your physio kept asking about and you kept saying it was just desk work, has dropped two centimetres. You catch yourself yawning at three in the afternoon because the body has worked out that it does not have to be vigilant for the first time in a long time, and it is taking the offer.

The mental version of the relief is quieter and stranger. There is a mid-sentence pause, several times a day in that first week, where you remember that you do not have to choose your next word carefully. You do not have to scan it for what it might give away. The internal editor that has been working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last fifteen years, has been told to go home, and is wandering around the office turning off the lights, blinking.

The fear is also still there

The fear has not gone. It has just been overrun, in the first week, by the relief, and it is waiting in the back room. It will come out. It comes out for me usually around five in the afternoon on the third or fourth day, when the immediate adrenaline of the conversations has burnt off and there is no more telling-people work to do, and I am suddenly inside a quiet kitchen with a cup of tea, and the brain remembers that I have just changed the entire architecture of my life and that the consequences are mostly still in front of me.

The fears in the first week are specific and worth naming because they shrink when you name them.

• Will my mum be different at Christmas. (Probably yes, mildly, in the first year. Probably no, by the second.)
• Will my work colleagues find out and treat me differently. (Some will. Most will not. The ones who do will sort themselves out by their own response.)
• Will the kids be teased at school. (Possibly. Schools handle this much better than they did ten years ago. Tell the school directly; do not let the kids be the ones managing the disclosure.)
• Will I be alone. (Statistically, no. Practically, you might feel that way for a stretch of weeks. The aloneness is real; the alone-ness as a permanent state is not.)
• Have I broken my marriage. (The marriage was already changing. You named it. Naming did not break it.)

I keep these on a list on my phone. Not to dismiss them. To stop them from compounding into a single undifferentiated cloud.

The body finally doing what it is meant to do

There is a thing that happens in the first week that I do not have a clean word for. The closest I can get is: the body starts behaving like itself.

Concretely: I have caught my own face in shop windows three times this week looking like a face I have not seen since my early twenties. Not younger, exactly. Less held. Less carefully composed. The eyes are doing what eyes are supposed to do, which is move around freely, look at people, return looks, register interest without flinching at the registration.

I noticed a man on the tram on Tuesday (mid-forties, reading a paperback, kind face) and I noticed him without then immediately also noticing that I had noticed and panicking about the noticing. The noticing was just noticing. There was no second tier of self-surveillance. This is, it turns out, what looking at someone is supposed to feel like, and I have not felt it since I was about nineteen.

I am not telling you this because the first week is about looking at men on trams. I am telling you because the closet is not a metaphor; it is a measurable load on the nervous system, and when the load comes off, the system does things it had forgotten it could do. The freed-up bandwidth is the surprise. You will use it for things that have nothing to do with sex. You will be more present with your kids in week two than you have been in years.

The first walk down the street

There is a moment in the first week, often around day three or four, where you go for a walk in your own neighbourhood with the new truth in your pocket, and you understand for the first time that nobody walking past you can tell.

I had imagined that being out would feel like walking around with a sign. It does not. It feels like walking around as yourself, while everyone else continues to walk around as themselves, and the day continues the way days do. Bins go out on Tuesday nights. The bakery opens at six-thirty. The school crossing supervisor still waves at the same cars. The world is calmly indifferent to your reorganisation, which is, if you let it be, an enormous gift.

The other thing about the first walk is that you suddenly notice gay men in your suburb you had not consciously registered before. Not because more have moved in. Because your eyes are doing a thing they had not been allowed to do, which is see. The bloke in the cap walking the staffy. The two men holding hands outside the cafe on the corner you have walked past for eleven years. They were always there. You were the one who was not.

A small, practical list of things I did in the first physical week of being out, that I would do again:

• A walk every day, alone, of at least thirty minutes. Body needs to discharge.
• Cooked dinner three nights of the seven. Routine carrying its own weight.
• Did not look at any apps yet. Not the right week.
• Did one piece of unrelated work that I had been putting off for months. Bandwidth landed there well.
• Did not drink for the first four days. Drank moderately on the fifth. Watched the pattern.
• Wrote three things down each night before bed. Two were specific reliefs. One was a specific fear. Kept them small and concrete.

The friend who responds badly

It will happen, and it will, in the first week, hurt out of proportion to the friendship.

For me it was a bloke I have known since the Stone Age, a uni friend who has been at every wedding and every birth, and who, when I rang him, was quiet for about six seconds and then said: "Mate, I love you, but I do not get this and I do not really want to talk about it for a while." He was kind enough to be honest about the fact that he was not going to be the friend I needed in this season. I thanked him. I got off the phone. I sat on the back step for forty minutes feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me, even though, by any reasonable standard, his response had been more thoughtful than most.

Two things to know about the bad responses, from the men who have been a year further down this road than me when I asked them:

• The first reaction is not the final reaction. Most of the friends who handle the news badly in week one have come around by month six. Some take a year. A small number do not come back, and you mourn them, and the friendship had been thinner than you realised.
• The hurt is real and it is not proportional to the relationship; it is proportional to your own raw state. A passing comment from a peripheral friend can wind you in week one in a way that the same comment in week sixteen would barely register. Do not make any decisions about friendships in week one. Park the response. Revisit it in three months.

The friend who responds beautifully

They will surprise you. They are often not the ones you expected.

Mine was a woman I worked with seven years ago and have seen four times since. I told her by accident. She rang about something else, I sounded off, she asked, I told her, and she said: "Oh, mate. Welcome. Really. Welcome." Then she asked what I needed and listened for forty minutes and did not, at any point, ask me to manage her response. At the end she said, "I am going to send you the name of a man I know who did this six years ago. He is good and he will pick up." She did. He did.

The beautiful responses share a shape. They are short. They do not ask you to be the educator. They do not require reassurance from you about how they are taking it. They contain a practical handover (a name, a number, a "next Wednesday at this cafe at seven, I will be there, you do not have to confirm"). They treat the news as information about you, not as a problem they have to solve.

Keep those people close. Tell them so. The friendships that survive this season at full strength tend to deepen, on the other side, into something steadier than they were before. You will have been seen, by them, while you were unprotected, and that does not unhappen.

What I wish I had known about week one

The week is not a verdict on the rest of your life. It is a single week. You are not yet the version of yourself you are going to be at six months out, or at two years out. You are a man in the first week of having put down a heavy thing, and the body is reorganising around the new weight, and the brain has not caught up with the body, and the day is asking you to do approximately the same things it asked you to do last Wednesday.

Do those things. School run. Tea. A walk. Sleep when sleep arrives. Note the relief out loud, to yourself, when it shows up. The body learns from being told it has been heard. Note the fear when it shows up too, in the same way. Do not, in this week, make any large decisions you can possibly defer.

The first week is mostly WEATHER. Stand in it. The shape of the rest of the life starts in week three.

Out, walking, breathing, home.