Throwaway account but this is such a specific situation that I’m certain she’ll see it but my friends won’t. So some context, I am a pretty successful graphic designer, I was already working from home for a lot of projects for a long time before everyone started self-quarantining and practicing social distancing. While I am definitely not part of the essential workforce, I have still managed to find some work to keep me busy. My fiancée has been furloughed from work and as such, has been staying home with me and we’ve been spending a lot of quality time together. One night, we were having fun and joking together and I jokingly said that everyone does weird things for money when they’re in school, like start an Etsy or sell feet pics. She joked back and fake-accused me of selling drugs. I told her it wasn’t anything illegal, illicit, nothing related to sex or drugs, but then accidentally let it slip that it was just embarrassing to me personally, and then after a second she stopped laughing because it became real. We talked about it and I said I didn’t want to talk about it because its super embarrassing and isn’t who I am at all. She said that she understood and gave me my space about it for a couple of days.
BUT after that couple of days she seemed uncomfortable and when I asked her about it, she admitted she was concerned about what I did for money. I told her it wasn’t anything huge, I really just didn’t want to talk about it and I wished her to respect that and to trust me, but I could tell her not knowing was beginning to genuinely upset her. That night, I thought long and hard that this is the woman I want to marry so and I should be open about my past, so relented and told her the truth: I used to be a clown. She was unhappy that it was something I hid from her, but it was a period of my life over the course of two and a half months and ~12 parties. She has been cold to me since and that really sucks because we have been spending a lot of time together and we aren’t really talking as much as we have been. From what I understand, she’s probably more upset that I had to be pressed to tell her than admit it to her of my own volition and I think I may have violated her trust. Honestly, the clown thing just never came up because who talks about their part time jobs from almost five years ago? It’s not on my resume and it was before we started dating, but I did end up sitting down with her and telling her everything. Now, I’m so so so scared that was a mistake because of how she’s acting now. She hasn’t told anyone, and though we haven’t really argued either, but now I’m wondering if I’m just reading into how she’s acting and obsessing over this new piece of information I put into her world. It feels like there’s a new distance between us.
Now I wasn’t hiding the fact that I was a semi-professional clown out of malice (I wasn’t part of any unions or anything, just kind of a performer-for-hire) but more out of embarrassment because it’s far and away from the type of work I do and the person I am today. Honestly, it’s not a dark period of my life or anything and I think the story itself is interesting (I’m one of those types that think some bad decisions can make good stories, to a degree) but it’s not something I like to talk about because while it is an objectively fun story, it doesn’t have a particularly good ending. My act was very specific and weird. Only two or three friends know about it, I think, because they were at the party where I got the idea to perform as a clown for money, and I literally just used the same costume from that party for my acts.
All things considered, I was pretty successful for what amounted to some weekend gigs. I didn’t want it to be something weird that would follow me for the rest of my life so I was secretive about it for those couple of months. I was always paid in cash, never check, and this was before electronic payments were huge (as in I didn’t have Venmo or do PayPal), surprisingly, made a few thousand dollars that I had put toward some of the fun things I own (game systems, electric skateboard, etc) but I stopped when that terrifying clown hoax of 2016 was happening and heard that people were getting ready to gang up and beat up clowns, so I thought it was best to cash out and hang up the clown costume, so to speak.
Also because I know it’ll be asked: back in Uni, I was an athlete as well. Kind of. I was part of a “martial arts” club where we would perform martial arts choreography at certain school events. It was kind of like color guard but with punching. When I told Fiancée this during our first few months dating, she made fun of me relentlessly for days but she ultimately thought it was kind of cool. Anyway, I put that athleticism in my act, where I’d break boards and do some parkour, but I’d also do some clown stuff like smack myself in the face with whipped cream in a dollar store pie crust and talk in a stupid voice and trip. It was fun because I was making little kids laugh and impressing them more than I was scaring them. Sometimes I’d get a parent involved and have them steal my clown nose and run away, and I’d trip and fall chasing them at first, which would set up the “parkour chase scene” of my act after I put some distance between us. By the way, it’s hard to convince big dads that yes, I will absolutely catch up to you and it will be much faster than you think. The kids love the act and i learned I would generally get paid more if I involved the family (with plenty of warning beforehand of what I was capable of). I never, ever, advertised this. This was just word of mouth and I think all of my clients knew each other in some way, and knew me as basically a friend of a friend.
Anyway tl:dr: told fiancée about my part time party clown gig and now she’s being distant with me while we’re quarantined and I’m unsure what to do? When should I have disclosed in our 2.5 year relationship that I was once a clown?
Submitted March 24, 2020 at 08:14PM by clownfu https://ift.tt/3aiDpaY
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