Coming Out to Myself. Something Shifted Inside.

Something had always known.

Photo by Mira Kireeva on Unsplash

I drove home. Thirty minutes from Lana’s house to where Aaron and I lived. Thirty minutes where I played the session over and over in my head.

My mind felt like it had heard news it always knew but had hoped to avoid. My heart was racing. My palms were sweaty. But my stomach. My gut. My breathing. Something had relaxed there. Something had understood those words. Something was echoing back to me something I had always, deep deep deep inside, known.

I’m a lesbian.

I didn’t know what to do with that. The next session with Lana was Wednesday. It was Monday. I had two full days to pretend nothing had changed. To be the same Lea who had walked out the door now walking back in.

I opened the front door. My eldest was at daycare. My youngest was with a caregiver. Aaron was home waiting for me. He greeted me with a big smile, asked how it went. He was so excited by me going to therapy, certain it would fix us, bring us back together, even though from the very beginning we had never really been together.

His words bounced off me while inside I kept hearing it.

I’m a lesbian. I’m a lesbian. I’m a lesbian.

I swallowed.

He started talking about a housing development. New. Prestigious. Near his parents and sister. His father had already gone to look at a lot for us. For us. There is no us. My mind was mixing sentences and feelings and I snapped back into the room.

What are you talking about?

He explained again. His father had scouted it. It would be great for the kids. We needed to go look now if we wanted it.

I looked at him blankly. The universe’s timing was almost funny. I had just taken the first step toward accepting the most important truth of my life, and Aaron was standing in our kitchen asking me to look at bigger houses near his parents.

I nodded.

We went. Bigger houses for happy families, Aaron’s father joked. Bigger houses for more kids. I felt the sour taste of panic mixed with absolute dread. I told Aaron, and his father, who was always present in every decision we made, that I wasn’t ready. That I needed time.

We drove home in silence.

Why don’t you want a better home, Aaron asked. What did you talk about at Lana’s?

I told him I spoke about our fights.

Did you tell her how you start them each time?

Yes.

Did you tell her that you say really mean things and lose control?

Yes.

So why don’t you want the house?

Who will live in that house?

Aaron looked at me. I looked straight ahead.

The two days passed in a blur. I worked. I mothered. I did everything I was supposed to do. But inside I was burning. Stripping down layer after layer, holding each one up to the light and asking how I had missed it. Her. The female characters. The cataloguing. The quizzes I rigged. The dreams. The subfolder of photos. All of it rearranging itself into a shape that finally made sense.

I had nothing, my mind kept saying. The apartment belonged to Aaron. The stability belonged to Aaron’s family. I had built my life inside someone else’s structure and now I was standing at the edge of it with the most clarifying thought I had ever had and nowhere to put it.

I waited for Wednesday.

Wednesday came. I walked into Lana’s house and immediately asked her how she had reached the conclusion that I was a lesbian when I hadn’t said anything about women.

She looked at me calmly.

I never said you were a lesbian. I asked what if you were attracted to women. Why?

And then I told her. How those words had made me feel. How for the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, something had shifted inside. How it all suddenly made sense. Every piece of it.

I’m a lesbian.

This is part of an ongoing memoir about coming out as a lesbian at 35, after a marriage and two kids. What came next was harder and more clarifying than anything that had come before.