Scotch, cigars, and golf, a thread:

A couple of years before I became self accepting, back when I was still “definitely a guy,” albeit one who dreamed of being a woman, I made a conscious decision - I would no longer pretend to enjoy cigars, golf, and scotch.

Seriously, I hate this stuff...

I had friends who loved scotch &, on special occasions, shared high-end samples with me. Nope. It’s just not good.

Some of my best friends loved golf. I bought some clubs & would tag along for the company, but I hated the game. I secretly found it silly and expensive and...

a waste of time. If you wanna go for a walk, let’s go for a walk. If you wanna have drinks, let’s have drinks. But please, no golf.

I started smoking cigars in university so I’d have a vice. I didn’t drink or smoke, & I wasn’t particularly interested in trying those things...

I smoked cigars here & there, on & off for years. Sometimes a group of guy friends would want to hang out and smoke cigars. Friends from the States would visit & obsess about Cubans. There’s a shop that sells them a couple blocks from me. So what?...

At some point, I was about halfway through a cigar & I thought “ok, this is absolutely awful. Why on earth have I been doing this to myself? It’s an objectively unpleasant experience on so many levels!”...

I had the same revelation about golf & scotch...

So I stopped. I dropped the pretence. I’d been trying to like these things for more than a decade, and suddenly it all felt silly. “I really don’t need to put myself through such unpleasantness in an effort to fit in,” I said to myself...

So, when people asked “do you golf?” (a lot of folks in my profession golf regularly), I said “oh, no. I hate it. I pretended to like it for a long while, but yeah, not anymore.”

I didn’t have as many opportunities to turn down cigars & scotch, but the idea is the same...

So now, I’m feeling liberated but isolated. If the experience of being “one of the guys,” of fitting in with many of my male friends was like a table, I had just chopped three of its legs clean off...

Of course, this doesn’t bother me like it used to. Being one of the guys doesn’t interest me in the least.

But now I’m sort of part of a community where, instead of scotch, golf, & cigars, it’s pop culture stuff - gaming, fantasy/sci-fi, comics, movies, etc...

The problem now is, I actually want to find my people. But y’all, I just don’t care about that stuff. I really & truly do not.

I’m sorry, but I can’t make myself pretend to enjoy something that just doesn’t appeal to me.

I said goodbye to that way of being a long time ago.

But it does feel lonely sometimes.

The problem with finding yourself is that sometimes, the person you find just doesn’t belong anywhere. I guess that’s a risk you take?