Chapter Fifteen
Living Out Loud
In 2018, I met a woman.
Even writing that sentence feels simple. Maybe that's because, by then, I was finally beginning to understand that it was simple.
I was a woman who loved women. Some part of me had known that since I was a little girl in Paintsville.
Sometimes I think about that little girl, the one who kissed another girl and then casually told Mom and Dad she was my girlfriend. I hadn't been ashamed. I liked her. That was all.
Then I got older, and the world got louder.
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Life carried me in other directions. I dated boys. I married Richard. I became a mother. I built a long life with Daniel. I worked. I raised my children.
But none of those things erased the truth I'd known about myself when I was young.
By 2018, I didn't want to hide it anymore.
For the first time in my adult life, I had space to ask myself what I wanted. Not what looked right. Not what made other people comfortable.
So when this woman entered my life, I allowed myself to love a woman openly.
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The relationship became serious, but much of what happened during those years belongs with the people who lived it.
Seven years of my life were connected to this woman. There were memories, ordinary days, good times, difficult times, and private conversations.
This book is my story, but that doesn't mean every person who crosses my path loses the right to privacy. Telling the truth doesn't require telling everything.
What matters here is what that period represented in my life.
She wasn't simply the first woman I would marry. She was the first woman I had built a real relationship and a life with. No matter how that story eventually ended, that mattered.
I was no longer hiding.
For the first time, the woman I was on the inside matched the woman I allowed the world to see.
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In 2022, we got married.
I became a wife again. This time, to a woman.
There was something powerful about that for me. Not because marrying a woman erased the men I'd loved. It didn't. It mattered because I was finally living without hiding a part of myself.
The little girl in Paintsville had grown up. It had taken her a long time to get there. But she had made it.
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I wish I could reach backward through all those years and tell that little girl something.
I wouldn't warn her about every heartbreak or every loss.
I'd simply tell her: There is nothing wrong with the way your heart loves.
Maybe she already knew that. Maybe it was everybody else who made her forget.
In 2022, I stood in a place I once wasn't sure I would ever allow myself to stand.
I was married to a woman. I wasn't hiding her. I wasn't hiding myself. And I wasn't waiting for somebody to tell me whether my life was acceptable.
Whatever the future held, that mattered.
At that moment, this was my life. And for the first time, I wasn't ashamed to let the world see it.