“I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this …” – Taylor Swift
I started this blog three years ago around this time because I needed something else in my life. I had a husband and two kids and a dog and a house and a job and an SUV: the suburban mom dream.
Except that something was missing. While my life looked close to ideal from the outside, I was numb inside from pretending. Pretending everything was okay when I knew it absolutely wasn’t. With every month that went by, I found new ways to make myself smaller and smaller until it felt like I had practically disappeared. I was lost.
I looked for every distraction to forget how unhappy I was at my core. And honestly – it worked. Most of the time, I didn’t feel unhappy. I was running too fast to allow myself to feel anything at all.
The blog was 2018’s distraction. It was an affair without ever being unfaithful. I built it with all the time, attention and love I should have been pouring into myself and my home life – hoping that it would fix the fundamental problems I wasn’t willing to acknowledge.
Like the distractions before it, it worked for a while. I met people I connected with and began to build a little community that felt more like home than the house I was living in. When I needed something, I turned here: for support, for friendship, and yes, for validation and attention. All things missing in my life until then.
Even when the newness wore off, I kept up the blog while I took on new distractions. But it started to weigh on me. I forced myself into a perfect life in squares on Instagram, convinced myself it was “real” because I sometimes parceled out real emotion in carefully crafted snippets accompanied by highly filtered photos. I was occasionally vulnerable but rarely genuine.
On the blog and in life, I felt trapped, yet I was afraid to leap. I was even afraid to look down.
And then in a moment, everything changed.
A kiss. A sunset. A friendship that was suddenly so much more.
At 38 years old, divorcing my husband of 13 years, with two young kids in the middle, I fell in love again – with a woman. A friend I’d known for several years, also 38, previously married to a man and with a child of her own.
Suddenly, I didn’t need to leap, or even look down. I just tumbled in freefall – falling for her hard, yet it was somehow the most natural thing in the world.
But you don’t fall in love with your friends.
That was the endless refrain in my head. No – you don’t. Until you do. Neither one of us planned it but the raw honesty shocked me. It was instant and undeniable. In one imperfect but somehow just-right moment, I felt all of the feelings, all at once. Desire. Panic. Confusion. Butterflies big enough that they could have been cranes. And underneath it all … this sense that finally I belonged somewhere. I fit. Her arms around me and her mouth on my mine clicked like nothing had ever clicked before.
Even so, this isn’t a story about coming out. There isn’t “out” for me – there’s no history of feelings I denied, and there’s never been another woman. There’s never even been a serious thought of another woman, for either of us. I kissed a friend once or twice in college, completely drunk, so that guys at bars would buy us drinks. I never felt a thing. This, with her, was wholly different.
The moment everything changed for me led to many moments where everything changed.
The single most intense period of my life unfolded in weeks and months, grappling with my entirely unexpected sexual fluidity while navigating divorce, a new job, single parenthood, family tensions, a house sale, a move, the resulting mental health instability from so.many.things. at once – all amid the weird Covid world we’re living in.
And yet, I’m still here.
This isn’t me, coming out. This is me, coming into my own.
Finally not afraid to trust myself and follow my heart, because at 38 years old, I’m old enough to know what I want – and it’s her. Love is love.
On the surface, these months have been rough. I’ve cried more than I’ve ever cried in my life. I’ve had panic attacks. I’ve had sleepless nights. On more than one occasion, I’ve completely lost my shit with my kids and I’ve cancelled on friends more times than they should be willing to forgive and I’ve been unfocused at my job.
But at my core, these months have been my undoing and my reconstruction all at once. A life that had been characterized by sadness since childhood is suddenly … not. I laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed before. I cry more too, because I finally feel things. I feel everything, so intensely, in a way that I never let myself before.
I’m not lost anymore. I’m found. She sees all of me, and she loves me while I am still learning how to love myself. She has been beside me as I walked away from everything I knew, watching it burn behind me, and she is holding my hand as I rebuild an authentic life from the ground up. She often knows how I’m feeling even before I do, and now I know that two people can communicate so much without ever saying a word. Sometimes a look and a half-smile is enough.
What does all of this mean for #NeverDoneWithFun? I started the blog as a different person, in a different place. Can it grow with me? Do I even want it to? I’m not sure. I do know that I don’t need the blog for validation the way I used to. Everything that I need has been inside me all along. I just needed the right person to show me how to find it again. How to find myself.
This is Chapter 2. It doesn’t fit into perfectly filtered boxes in a social media feed anymore, but it’s perfect for me, and for her and I together, because it’s real. There is happiness here. Genuine happiness. And there is freedom, at last. ♥
