"I am gay... and I am terrified."

Yesterday, a friend messaged me to say that she'd given someone information about my services: 


I gave your info... to one of my dearest friends. She is married and has two kids. She just this morning wrote the words for the first time...'I am gay...and I am terrified.'


And just like that I was naked again, folded up on the elegant tile floor of a walk-in shower that I had designed myself just months before. The remodel was needed, mostly, I think to save our marriage, the way some people have a baby because that will make them something that they suspect they are supposed to be.  


Remodeling the outdated space also gave the downstairs a half-bath, evicting the four children and their slew of friends from the bathroom that led directly into our bedroom. It was a major renovation, which turned the biggest bedroom in the house into a true master suite... and when I left, the Master let the children use that bathroom anyway. He had a broken heart and filled it with whoever was around. First, that was me and in my absence, filling that damned shower with the children was a move necessary for his survival. 


I understand him because that shower nearly killed me, too. At least, I begged it to on the night in question.


I'd been out with a friend and came home with the truth, MY TRUTH, pulsing through my veins. It wasn't about her, it was me... the real me. I kept the real me locked up in a secret room in my mind and I'd in time, I'd told the friend about my truth, showed her where the real me was being held. She wasn't the first person I showed. In fact, I'd revealed my truth to many and yes, even my husband. He thought it was novel, I believe, and containable because of that nice room I kept her in, but this friend...


She was something of a trouble-maker, a great deal like me, in fact. She clung to truth. She liked the real me better, as did I. As I spoke my truth, she understood. She held a space for the truth, even when I locked the truth back up and returned to suburbia. She knew the truth... even when I turned my back on it to go back to married life. 


It was a survival technique. I had to go back to the soccer field, the car rider line... I had to go back to being that man's wife. More and more, I'd found that the door was ajar. My friend simply stood there in the door frame, very calmly, and held the door open. When I asked her to move, so I could close the door, she would gently ask, "Is that what you want me to do?" Every time it was harder to say yes, I grieved a little more, the longing to be me was strong, and lasted longer. When I said no, living my regular life was... unbearable. Abandon me, or abandon the blended paradise I'd built. I was in hell. 


The water is hot, perhaps unbearably so... on any other day but my skin feels almost nothing. Every part of me is melting down and through my hysteria, I beg God to change me... or him. Truly desperately, I plead to be changed into the kind of woman who lives like I am trying to live or change him into the kind of man who can let me go. My husband knows me, my truth, and he is unchanged by it. There is no room for her, the real me, here in our marriage. There is also no room for me to leave. It is not an option. He is unwilling for me to go. 


My prayers remained... unanswered. My tears fell on deaf ears. He even came in once and put his hand on my head and said, "It will be okay." I sobbed that it wasn't okay, and he left. He was unmoved by my suffering and in that moment I realized that the suffering was optional. My suffering hadn't changed the truth of who I was, and it certainly hadn't changed his willingness to accept it. 


Long after the water turned cold, I crawled to our bed a whole woman again. On the cold, hard floor of that shower, I fell in love with my truth. I was a lesbian. And while I was wholly terrified of what would inevitably follow, nothing could take away the peace and love and strength I found in the willingness to live my truth.