Late to Myself

On Coming Out at Almost Forty

I have been thinking about how to write this for a while.

I’ve opened a blank page more times than I can count, typed a few sentences, and closed it again. Not because I don’t know what I want to say, but because saying it out loud, in writing, to the people who read my work, feels like the kind of thing you can’t take back. And I’ve spent most of my life in a tradition that taught me my job was to be careful. To be measured. To consider how what I say will land before I say it.

So here’s me, being careful one last time, before I stop being careful about this particular thing.

This is a Pride Month piece. It is also a coming home piece. And it is also, inevitably, a piece about what it costs to come out at almost forty after a lifetime of being told that the person you actually are is someone you are not allowed to be.

I’m queer.

And I’m still learning what it means to say that like it’s just a fact about me, rather than a confession.

What Purity Culture Does to a Queer Kid

I didn’t know I was queer when I was young. Or more accurately: I knew something, and I had no language for it that wasn’t also a condemnation.

Purity culture doesn’t just regulate behaviour. It regulates interiority. It reaches inside and tells you what your desires mean, what your feelings mean, what your noticing means. And if what you’re noticing is the wrong thing, if who you’re drawn to doesn’t fit the sanctioned script, purity culture doesn’t just tell you to behave differently. It tells you that the desire itself is the problem. That you are the problem.

So you learn not to know.

You learn to look away from the thing you’re feeling before it fully forms. You learn to interpret every inconvenient feeling as temptation, as spiritual warfare, as a test of your faithfulness. You learn to be so fluent in the language of sin and sanctification that you can translate your own experience into something manageable before it ever has a chance to be true.

And then you build a life on top of that. A life that makes complete sense inside the framework. A life that looks, from every external angle, like exactly what it’s supposed to look like.

And it works. For a very long time, it works.

The Life That Made Sense

I got married young, the way you do when marriage is the only sanctioned container for adult life. Twenty years. A real marriage, one that held real love and real history and real life. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to read this as a story where the marriage was always wrong. It wasn’t that simple. Very few twenty-year things are.

But earlier this year, that marriage ended. And in the unravelling of it, in the painful, necessary, grief-soaked process of separating two lives that had been built together for two decades, something else unravelled too.

Or maybe it didn’t unravel. Maybe it finally surfaced. Maybe it had been waiting, patient and persistent, for the moment when there was finally enough space for it to exist.

I’m queer. And I know that somewhere underneath everything, I have always been. I just didn’t have a self that was safe enough to know it.

The Grief Nobody Prepares You For

Coming out later in life is complicated in ways that early coming out isn’t. And I say that not to create a hierarchy of difficulty, but because I work with people who are navigating this exact experience, and I think the specific texture of late coming out deserves to be named honestly.

There is grief. So much grief.

Grief for the years you spent not knowing yourself, or knowing and not being able to act on it, which amounts to the same loss. Grief for the younger version of you who deserved to have language for what she was feeling and didn’t get it. Grief for the experiences you didn’t have, the relationships you didn’t pursue, the version of your life that might have looked different if you’d had access to yourself earlier.

There is grief for the certainty you’re losing, even when the certainty was a cage.

Because the framework that told you who you were, even when it was wrong about who you were, also gave you structure. And dismantling it leaves you standing in open space that can feel, at least at first, more like exposure than freedom.

There is grief for the community that won’t be able to hold this.

For the relationships that have already shifted or ended. For the people you love who will read this and feel confused, or hurt, or afraid for you. For the version of yourself they knew, who they will grieve in their own way, which you don’t get to control.

And there is a particular grief that I think is specific to queer people who come out after leaving fundamentalism.

Grief for the spiritual home you will never have because many of us don’t just lose a marriage or a community or a framework when we come out. We become, in the eyes of that tradition, the thing we were always warned about. And even when we know the tradition was wrong, even when we’ve done the work of understanding that, the loss of belonging is real.

The Anger

Let me be honest about the anger, because I think it deserves its own space rather than being folded into the grief.

I am angry.

I’m angry that I spent decades inside a system that was so effective at teaching me to distrust my own inner life that I couldn’t access a fundamental truth about myself. I’m angry that purity culture reaches so deep, so early, that it can shape the architecture of someone’s selfhood before they have any capacity to consent to that shaping. I’m angry that the theology of shame and sin and wrongness gets installed so comprehensively that even the most private, interior experiences get filtered through it.

I’m angry that this is not just my story. That I sit with clients who are navigating versions of this same experience, who are in their thirties and forties and fifties and beyond, who are finally allowing themselves to know something they’ve been suppressing for decades, because the system they grew up in was so effective at making them afraid of themselves.

I’m angry at the years. Not because they were wasted, I don’t think they were, but because they were lived at a distance from myself. And I want to be honest that anger is an appropriate response to that. I’m not interested in spiritualising it or finding the lesson or rushing to gratitude. The anger is real and it’s valid and it gets to exist.

The Joy

And then there is this: I am also happier than I have been in a very long time.

Not happy in the way that ignores grief. Not happy in the way that pretends the loss isn’t real. But happy in the way that comes from finally being oriented toward something true.

There is something that happens when you stop spending energy on maintaining a version of yourself that doesn’t fit. It frees up resources you didn’t know you were using.

You think more clearly. You feel more present. You laugh differently. You make decisions from a different place, because the decisions are actually yours now, made by a person who knows herself, rather than made by a person performing someone she’s been told to be.

I am also, for the first time in my adult life, genuinely curious about my future. Not anxious about it in the way I was when the future was a script I had to follow correctly. Curious. Open. Interested in what it contains.

That’s new. And it’s good.

What It’s Like to Live in All of It at Once

Here’s what nobody tells you about coming out later in life: you don’t get to feel one thing at a time.

The grief and the joy and the anger and the relief don’t arrive in sequence. They’re simultaneous.

• You can be genuinely happy about who you are and genuinely furious about what it cost to get here in the same breath.

• You can be grieving your marriage and grateful to be yourself at the same time.

• You can feel the loss of your old community and the possibility of new belonging without either one cancelling the other out.

This is confusing. It’s also, I’ve come to think, just accurate, because this is a complicated thing. And the feelings that are doing justice to it are going to be complicated too.

For others who are navigating this, I often talk about the concept of ambiguous loss, the particular kind of grief that comes from losing something that was also harming you.

You can grieve a marriage that needed to end.

You can grieve a faith that was a cage.

You can grieve a version of yourself that you’ve outgrown.

And the grief doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It just means that loss is loss, even when it’s also liberation.

On Being a Queer Person Who Works in Religious Trauma & Cult Recovery

I want to name this explicitly, because I think it matters.

My work in religious trauma, in coercive control, in supporting survivors of high-control groups & cults, has always been informed by my own experience of fundamentalist evangelicalism and pentecostalism. That’s not a secret. I’ve written about it, spoken about it, built my practice around the intersection of my personal and professional knowledge.

What I haven’t named publicly, until now, is that my experience also includes this. Being queer inside a tradition that had a very clear position on what that meant. Navigating my own sexuality through the lens of purity culture and shame theology. Doing the work of deconstruction not just intellectually and theologically, but in my own body and my own life.

I’m naming it now because I think it changes something about how I show up in this work. Not the quality of it, I hope I’ve always brought authenticity and care to this work regardless. But the wholeness of it. I can now bring my full self to the conversations I have with queer clients who are coming out of high-control backgrounds, because I’m not holding part of myself back. I’m not supporting them from a distance. And I think that’s worth saying out loud.

What I Want You to Know If You’re in This

If you’re reading this and you’re somewhere in this experience, if you’re in your thirties or forties or fifties or beyond, if you’re holding something about yourself that you’ve never had the safety or the language or the space to say out loud, if you’re somewhere in the complicated terrain of knowing who you are after a lifetime of being told who you’re supposed to be, I want to say something directly to you.

It’s not too late. Whatever you’re afraid of, whatever you’ve been told this would cost you, whatever version of the future you’ve been avoiding because naming the truth would require dismantling the present: it is not too late.

The grief is real. The anger is real. The disorientation is real. So is the joy. So is the relief. So is the strange, quiet, persistent sense of finally being oriented toward yourself.

You don’t have to have it all figured out to start. You don’t have to be certain about everything in order to be certain about this. You don’t have to be ready in the way you think readiness should feel before you’re allowed to begin.

You just have to be willing to let yourself be known. First to yourself, and then, when you’re ready, to those you trust.

Happy Pride

This is my first Pride as someone who has publicly, honestly, fully come home to myself. And I want to mark that, even though the marking feels tender and strange and a little overwhelming.

Happy Pride feels complicated when you’re also grieving. When you’re in the middle of rebuilding. When the joy of knowing yourself is sitting right next to the pain of what it cost to get here.

But I think that’s actually what Pride is supposed to hold. Not just celebration, but the full truth of what queer people have had to navigate to get to a place where celebration is even possible. The grief and the anger and the resilience and the connection and the joy, all of it, all at once.

So. Happy Pride.

I’m queer. I’m almost forty. I’m rebuilding my life from the ground up, and I am more myself than I have ever been.

That’s enough. More than enough.

That’s everything.