Everyone knows the phrase "coming out of the closet." For a member of the LGBTQIAP+ community, it seems to be the central storyline to our lifelong narrative. “When did you come out?” “How long have you been in the closet?” “It’s time to be your real self.” Movies and TV shows constantly embattle queer/LGBT+ characters with the struggle of confessing one’s non-normative identity– revealing themselves to society Once and For All. After all, once you’ve owned up to being gay, what else is there?

The truth is, it’s nothing like this.

Coming out as a queer person isn’t like stepping out a closet door: one minute hidden in the dark, the next out under the light of day. It’s more like stepping into a hallway— or, better yet, a maze with a thousand doors, each of which you have to choose whether to open up or leave be. I’m “out” in the sense that I have publicized my identities to my family, friends, peers, and colleagues; I write regularly about queer experiences, I label myself publicly on the internet, I don’t hide who I am. But does that mean I am automatically Out and Recognized to anyone I may meet?

Hell no. Nobody is. Really, nobody. No matter how camp a person dresses or how many pins they put on their denim jackets, coming out is never finished as long as one continues to go through life and interact with new people.

Many people think coming out looks like it does on TV: you confess your identity to your friends and family, there are tearful hugs or maybe denial or, in the worst cases, violence and abuse (no pressure.) You walk around the next day and… everybody knows. Ta-da! Congrats, you’re publicly gay now. You never have to go through that awful, draining, debilitating process ever again.

Here’s what it actually looks like, drawn from experiences I’ve had or seen: you confess your identity to your friends. They chime in with messages of support. To the rest of the school, you’re still the same person, and you have to decide whether or how to change that. Nothing has changed, except for the decisions you now have to actively make. Do you engage in PDA with the person you’re dating? Do you speak up in class debates on whether or not gay marriage should be legalized? Do you write a confession on yourself for Day of Silence or Coming Out Day, rather than say a thing aloud? Each time you have to make the choice to come out again. Or maybe you’re outed, once more, by someone else – a teacher walks in on you and your girlfriend; a partner ambushes you in the classroom and publicly asks if you’ll go to prom; someone’s sister sees you at a rally. Does it even count as being nonconsensually outed if you’re “out” already to your immediate community?

Sometimes you have to juggle being out of the closet in one world and in it the next. Maybe you’re in a relationship with someone whose family is homophobic and abusive. Or you don’t want your family to know. Or you are afraid of losing your job, so you keep quiet there. Or your friends know but your school administration doesn’t, and would punish you if they did.

Or maybe no one’s punishing you. Maybe it’s just exhausting. Can you imagine having to take an essential aspect of yourself, your identity, your life, and formally present it to everyone you know just so it’s not constantly erased? Can you imagine the drain of weighing whether the potential relief will be worth the potential awkwardness, the possibility that your friend or peer may secretly be homophobic (or transphobic, or acephobic, or...), fielding questions, having to justify and legitimize and explain; having to find the time, the place, the situation, how to put in words, how to be diplomatic; the very fact that you have to be diplomatic, and sensitive and prepared and confident and sympathetic, when it is you, you who are the one with the identity which is a target for others? Hell, do other people have a need for your personal information at all? Or, on another hand, do you have the strength to deal with assumptions that otherwise delegitimize you every single day?

Say you’re completely “out” in your everyday life. Like me, your teachers know, your counselors know, your friends and peers know, your colleagues know, your family knows. So you think you’ve got it covered. Or other people think you do. What about that one extended family member though, whom you never speak to, but who will be visiting for Thanksgiving? What do you tell them? Do you bring it up? What about your mother’s book club friends, who make small talk when they’re over? What about your friend’s father when you pick them up for dinner? What about the professor you know but whose class you haven’t taken, who you run into in the hallways?

Small talk seems harmless until you’re any kind of queer/LGBT+, at which point you quickly realize that it’s littered with assumptions that you date certain genders (or any genders), have the same body parts and identities and experiences, and participate in the same romantic and social rituals. Every awkward pause is a moment where the gears churn and you have to decide whether to open that door and highlight your difference. How much do you want to explain? How much do you want to let pass?

And then, of course, there’s strangers.

Situation 1: A person of a gender you’re not interested in solicits you. Do you:

A) Just say no and risk them pressing you on why?

B) Tell them you’re gay/ace/whatever and risk them asking you for a threesome – or throwing slurs, or verbal abuse?

C) Lie?

Or maybe they assume you’re a gender you’re not. In this case:

A) Tell them you’re trans, and risk potential physical violence?

B) Ignore it and suffer the misgendering?

Or hey, here’s a thought. They know your gender and your orientation doesn’t exclude theirs. But you’re some form of aromantic or asexual, or both. You can:

A) Go along with advances and risk them blowing up on you in the future when you aren’t as up for it;

B) Try to explain only to scare them away – or be delegitimized, disbelieved, harassed, or raped; or

C) Maybe it’s easier just to turn them down altogether, avoid the risk, and constantly eliminate your chances of actually having a successful connection with somebody.

Or Situation 2: Regular social scenario. No complex dating rituals. You’re going out to eat, or to the bank, or to literally anywhere, ever. You’re trans, maybe nonbinary, and you may or may not pass. Someone you interact with briefly misgenders you. Do you:

A) Say something, or

B) Shut up and suffer?

Maybe it’s in a drive-thru, and it only matters for thirty seconds. Maybe it’s at a restaurant, and the server keeps coming back and saying “ladies” over and over and over and over, and you consider poisoning yourself right there on the spot. Maybe it’s a visiting poet in your class who you really admire, but they take the cue from your forgetful teacher at dinner and keep calling you “she.” Maybe you’re at a concert or event or raffle and you win the opportunity to go up to the stage and they’re introducing you with the wrong goddamn pronouns. So you can:

A) Answer to the mistake and misgender yourself? Or

B) Tell them the truth– if you even get the chance, figuring out how to explain, wondering if you’re going to come off as an asshole or ungrateful for not just letting it slide.

It seems like most people don't consider that coming out isn’t always a one-time-fits-all experience. Some people shift and develop or discover new identities or different orientations. Maybe you came out as queer in high school, but now you have to come out again as trans, or ace, or polyam. And sometimes you’re not coming out to the cisheteronormative representative, you’re coming out within queer subcommunities. Your potential boyfriend may know you’re not hetero, but does he know that you’re bisexual, not gay? What about coming out as nonbinary to a partner who is strictly gay or straight? What if you join a trans student organization and have to clarify that the relationships you’re talking about coexist, or you have to explain to your poly queer community that, actually, you’re asexual?

This is getting messy to describe, and I want you to know why: because coming out is messy. It’s messy, and constant, and incomplete. To be utterly blunt, coming out is goddamn hard. Once you’re out of the closet in your own personal circle, it’s no longer a question of “being who you really are;” you’re always who you really are. For the rest of your life, coming out is really for the benefit of the person who didn’t know. It’s not a revelation; it’s a correction. It’s the exhaustion of knowing you’re not hiding anything, but people have still put an image of perceived standards on you and you have to deliberately sidestep, prevent, or shove it off just to feel like you are, in fact, visible in your own honest skin.

Coming out isn’t like stepping out of a closet. There is no “closet.” There is no "I am completely hidden" versus "everyone knows who I am now." You step out from a world in which you knowingly remained shrouded, and enter a world in which the shroud is still just as present; only it’s not put on by you, it’s the one worn by everyone else, through which they see any person as x y z standard, until outed.

So hey, here’s a thought: maybe stop asking so much of queer/LGBT+ individuals. Maybe stop expecting us to explain ourselves, correct your expectations, and constantly defend our own identities while you continue to exist under the presumption of "cishet until proven otherwise." When you’re single, you learn to not assume you know someone else’s relationship status until you ask them. Do the same for orientation and gender. All I’m asking is, cisgender heteronormatives, consider that it is not just the queer person’s responsibility to announce their queerness. The world might be just a little bit easier to live in if the rest of you, too, took the burden of assumption off of our shoulders, and admitted that you just don’t know who or what people are at first glance—and it shouldn’t always be on them to prove that.