When Denial Is No Longer an Option

1. In the beginning.

Innocent. Exciting. Naive. Pulsing with possibility. In the beginning, the promise and potential, the envisioning, as if it were up to us how things would unfold. In the beginning, sheer determination, make it happen, new and novel. in the beginning, hope.

In the beginning, disbelief. This can’t be happening. What’s happening? In the beginning, confusion, chaos, upended, uncertain. In the beginning, a hint of the ending, a knowing. In the beginning, denial, burial, eyes forward. In the beginning, if we talk enough it won’t be happening.

In the beginning, sincerity. So earnest. In the beginning, youth that doesn’t know it’s young. In the beginning, leaning hard on old models and seeking out new ones, wide-eyed if not quite bushy-tailed. In the beginning, follow the rules, do the things, sleep without cold sweats or questions. Sweep away the questions.

In the beginning, discomfort tendriled around intrigue. No name for it yet. A woman in a room. A leather cuff. A nuthatch in a pine tree. In the beginning, distance. Othering. I’m not like you. In the beginning, something else was unraveling. The ability to contain myself any longer.

In the beginning, everyone had my all. In the beginning, there was no stopping me. In the beginning, angels braided little flowers into my hair. In the beginning, I finally knew I was here.

2. I finally knew I was here.

It was a homecoming, the kind of religious experience you hear about but don’t often, or ever, experience firsthand. Finally knowing I was here felt like birth and death in the same moment, a shattering of self that was at once devastating and liberating. If I told you it was pouring rain, and there was thunder and lightning all around, you’d think I was being dramatic. But it’s true.

What’s also true is that life sometimes tears us wide open. And this is not pretty but painful, the kind of pain you don’t know if you’ll be able to endure. I didn’t know. I was crazy with energy, as if someone had plugged me into a light socket. That electrified, that bright, and that dangerous.

This morning — nearly eight years later — my child was looking at pictures from his early childhood. A few years before the moment I’m describing, we were, by all appearances and even our own accounts, a happy family of four. That was before, before, before.

But the truth is, even the before is a kind of middle, because nothing happens overnight, not even the things that seem sudden and shocking that change everything instantaneously. Like anything that grows or dies, there is a process made up of an uncountable number of micro-moments. The truth is, I was listening for this. I listened for it my whole life.

Sometimes the listening made me feel lost, disconnected, frightened, and depressed. Other times, it was like a call at a frequency I couldn’t yet decipher. One thing is for sure: It kept getting louder.

3. It kept getting louder.

I look back now, on things I wrote during the years leading up to that week, that day, night, that instant, and it’s so clear. I was digging for the landmine.

I was sitting.
I was running.
I was making dinner and doing bath time with kids.
I was making lunches.
I was doing dishes.
I was coaching clients.
I was writing blog posts.
I was mapping out the book I couldn’t quite write.

The book was my life. The book was me.

The book was my sexuality and my being burning an exit route through the middle of my body.

My fear was so big. My fear of losing what we had. I held on for dear life. So dramatic. I also loved. Blah blah blah blah.

OK, so what really? What kept getting louder? Not a sound, so much as a knowing. A knowing that had lived in a bubble way off to the right or left of my consciousness, above and over a bit — if you were here I would show you.

The container thinning over time like a cervix until there was no choice — the truth would not leak like amniotic fluid; it would burst forth, like labor that comes on hard and fast and shakes the foundations of your house of cards.

And then I was there, holding my newborn self, weeping for what could no longer be, and observing the rubble.

God has a way. God has a way of insisting. You can fight it but in the end, not really. And also, fighting it will leave you exhausted, injured, soul-sick.

Mary Oliver knew, when she wrote: “Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”

I gulped the night air, texting frantically. “What do we do now?” She asked. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I replied. But I knew. I was just terrified to say it out loud.

4. I was terrified to say it out loud.

It had been one thing to tell her how I felt, another to tell my husband, “I am gay,” and ultimately, the hardest thing I’d ever faced for us to make the decision to separate. Finally, though, after a summer of tension, lies and truths and tears and hours of talking and impossible distance, it was clear. I was already gone. Staying together was not an option. Once I came out, there was no putting me back in.

I’ve written this story so many times in different ways. Sometimes I think, why am I still writing it? It was so seminal. The fault line between one life and another. And like a gaping wound, fault lines close and heal but they leave scars and memories.

Will I close the door once and for all and forever on those days, or will I keep writing these snippets behind closed doors, even as I look out at the life I have now — my beloved napping in the bedroom, my brand new puppy snoring in the kitchen, my daughter who turns 16 this year sitting here in the living room with me, my son entering middle school next year.

These kids were four and seven then, when we said the thing to them out loud that changed their worlds irrevocably: “We’re no longer going to live together.”

I know more than half of American children grow up with divorced parents. It’s not that unusual. But I was raised to think divorce was one of the Most Terrible Things Ever. (Along with debt. God forbid.)

In this moment, my house is peaceful. I am learning, layer after layer, to let my insides be peaceful, too. The kids are alright.

5. The kids are alright.

In this moment, my house is peaceful. I am learning, layer after layer, to let my insides be peaceful, too.

In the end, that’s so much of what this life is. Returning, again and again, to what it feels like to be fully myself. It’s so easy to drift, to forget, to get hyper-focused on that which causes anxiety or simply on the revolving needs of keeping a household humming.

In the end, it’s a quality of being honest that is liberating. For so long, I wasn’t fully honest. I lied outright about some things, like smoking, and in a more subconscious way about deeper things, things that I didn’t have names for, things that were so big I was afraid to expose them.

In the end, coming out was freeing, but it wasn’t the end. It was really the beginning of a whole new book, so many chapters of learning and unlearning how to be myself without slipping back into the shadows. I slip up — I remind myself everyone slips up and that I am not exempt from this being human thing. But I come back. I come back to the courage to sit down and say: I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m tired. I’m not sure. I’m sorry.

In the end, there is this: Sitting here in the living room with the windows open, glancing up every minute or two at the newly budding trees along the side of the driveway. The smell of summer rain and a wind picking up in the pines. A family changing and growing, and not in the ways we tried to cling to when the old family came apart.

I had tried to keep it together even after the ending, and what I’ve learned is that sometimes, you have to let a thing go all the way. Not just partway, just newly configured, but just… done. This has been hard for me, a keeper, a holder-on. But it also delivered me here. And here is beautiful. Here is real. Nothing buried, nothing burning a hole in me.­­

I am so grateful.