This morning, on the first day of Pride, I stood on the corner of a busy downtown street with a throng of staff, watching the flags be raised for Pride Month and Indigenous History Month. And I had a brief out-of-body experience.

It happens every once in a while. I just suddenly remember that I get to be “out.” It’s not like it’s really possible to forget something so enormous. I guess it just gets clouded over in the middle of all this ordinary life. And then it suddenly shows back up like a bird flying straight into the window of my day, startling me awake.

Oh yeah. Gay girl here.

I walked home tonight thinking about that June, 14 years ago when I came out in the middle of my life. It seems so impossibly long ago now, and yet I still have so many mixed-up feelings about it. The whole thing sort of feels like a junk drawer I can’t quite get organized. And the good Lord – and Charlene – know how I love a junk drawer. 

As I made my way down King Street, I was thinking about some of the things people said to me back then. How I would never wish any of them on another living soul. How they landed in the softest parts of me, making an already impossible passage feel even narrower and darker.

What kind of mother are you?

Explain to me how it happens that you just change your mind. 

So, is this your new lifestyle now?

This is worse than your brother dying. It’s like you’ve died too.

How are we supposed to explain this to people?

It’s just a phase.

You should have waited until the kids were older.

This feels selfish.

You should have tried harder.

It would have been easier if you hadn’t survived when you were so sick. 

You got away with it. You didn’t suffer enough.

You have a good life – what is wrong with you?

I should have left too, but I couldn’t do that to my kids.

You’re not the same person. 

I think you’re the reason my cancer came back.

You could have kept this to yourself. 

You fucked everything up. 

These were not small things. At the time, those words made the world feel small and cruel. They magnified this feeling I had that the tectonic plates were literally shifting under my feet, keeping me perpetually off-kilter when I was concentrating so hard on finding my way forward.

At some point, I just accepted them as part of the toll exacted for crossing the bridge into myself. And for a long time, I thought the only sane wish was to wish they could be taken back — rewind the tape, erase the sentences. 

But you know how it is. Once words like that are spoken, they turn into ghosts, haunting every room in you. When I think about those moments now though, I don’t want the words taken back. They weren’t fair. They weren’t kind. They were nothing but devastating. But they taught me things.  

They revealed the architecture of other people’s fear and sadness. They showed me the limits of their imagination, the boundaries of their love, the places where their grief turned into blame. They showed me how terrified they were of losing the version of me they had built their lives around. It’s true that I hadn’t really considered that I would somehow be lost to anyone, when I was still right there in front of them. 

I eventually came to see the sorrow and heartbreak and panic and desperation behind those words — the human ache that ran just beneath the surface. I lived in enormous guilt over it. And it later taught me that even when I can hold compassion for someone else’s suffering — and forgive the words — those things do not erase the impact of what was said, nor do they always lessen the hurt.

And I learned more about who I was. And who I was not. After some time, I learned empathy without self-abandonment. I learned that there is a vast difference between understanding my own pain in theory and allowing myself to feel it in my body. I learned that my truth is at least as sturdy as anyone’s disappointment. That my identity is not a negotiation. And, that if I once could have died with a secret inside me, then I can certainly survive being misunderstood about the truth.

At the end of the day, I didn’t come out to be loved. I came out to be known. And I’ve learned that few feelings in this life are more glorious than that one. 

So, for those who are out. And those who are not. For the 8^th grader who is afraid to go to school. For the high schooler reading “Beyond the Gender Binary” with a flashlight under the covers when everyone’s asleep, for the parents who have “come around“, for the first time she said “partner” out loud, for the office Christmas party where he introduced his husband to his boss, for the still terrified, for the hearts that will never come out but that still pound and pound and pound with love, for everyone we have lost, for all we are still fighting to win, for chosen families, for all of us – God help us – doing the messy, miraculous work of being real….

I know for sure that no two stories are the same. And that everything beautiful survived something to get here.