Here, I want to paint the symphony of my coming out in six acts.

movement one: when you notice the music that’s been playing in your background.

When it started, it surfaced as a murmur, a soft are you sure? simmering right under my skin, the question so quiet it manifested as a shiver rather than a step in any direction.

I was lying on a narrow bed, left arm pressed heavily into the mattress and back touching the wall, my fingers mindlessly twisting the fleece sheet draped under us. If I were to push my palm against the bed and spread my fingers wide, I’d be just a breath away from warm skin and soft hair. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about that, though. Even on the fourth night we spent stretched out on a college-dorm bed small enough to make intimacy an inevitability, nightgowns splayed over tangled legs, I named the warmth settling between my lungs friendship. If someone were to ask me why I couldn’t just walk the ten minutes it would take to get back to my room, I’d say it’s because I was exhausted.

There’s also nothing that spells out belonging quite like her laugh. 

movement two: when someone else sees before you want them too.

Sometimes, the revelation comes out sharp, like that swooping feeling in your gut when you lose your step making your way down stairs. “You’re not straight, you know,” someone once told me, “you’ll see, just give it some time.” For days, the declaration stayed lodged somewhere in my abdomen, rattling quietly against my organs despite all my efforts to shrug the observation off. Weeks later, I stood in front of my mirror, damp towel discarded on the floor, and spent a small eternity looking at myself to find something, anything, that would pass as a marker of queerness. The person staring back at me was the same as the one I had always known.

movement three: when you understand there’s more to you than you thought.

There comes a pivot point in your story, an aha moment, when all the pieces settle and you find your footing. It had been hours of lazy grins and fluttering touches before we found ourselves alone, lying on damp grass and looking up at the sky, the push and pull of our movements almost as intoxicating as the cheap tequila we drank at the party.  It was so quiet here, in the middle of the forest, that you could almost hear the burning tips of our cigarettes hiss with every inhale. By the time her fingers brushed mine, that soft are you sure?, the one that surfaced again when I first met her earlier this evening and tagged her as a new friend, was drumming loudly against my chest. She smiled back at me, and I finally found my answer.

She was the first person I came out to—we kissed, and I believed everything was going to be okay.

movement four: when you feel seen.

My roommate woke up to find me sitting against my headboard with a forehead on my thighs and an arm slung across my knees, fingers painted gold gripping the fabric of the dress she and I had picked out the night before. She spent seconds that seemed to stretch out like days staring at us, her bleary eyes fixated on the shape that was distinctly woman pressed along my side. I felt so exposed in that moment that I almost wanted to swallow down everything that happened and tuck my queerness back into whatever corner it had found a home in for the past twenty years. But she just clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle the delighted laughter spilling past her grin, slipped on her robe, and shuffled out the door.

It is among the friends who see my evolution and understand continuity that I feel most like myself, where belonging truly settles in the space between my soul and my skin.

movement five: when you learn that love doesn’t always mean kindness.

There is a scene in my coming out story where on my twenty-first birthday, the words “Mama, I am in love with a woman” spill out of me and I spend the next two years of my life in mourning. Her eventual “I love you, but I will never support your choice” is still lodged deep between my ribs, even as two months ago marked the four year anniversary since I first told her. To me, it is a reminder that while I get to control the truth I want to live, the reactions others have are much more elusive; that no matter how much comfort I derive from aligning my actions to my intentions, fear and shame often come in reaction to something different. 

movement six: when you define coming out for yourself.

Sometimes, coming out in the way the world has come to understand isn’t really an option. It isn’t for me, anyway. I don’t have the luxury of voicing to every person I know in every space I occupy that the idea of someone’s gender identity has about as much impact on my attraction to them as their favorite ice-cream flavor. That, one day, I might build my forever with someone who isn’t a man. When people define “coming out” as the act of revealing to others your sexual orientation or gender identity, it makes me feel like, somehow, I’m still in, still stuck somewhere, hidden and afraid, far away from the visible and understood.

Last month, I was sitting at the dining table as my grandmother did her round of afternoon calls. When she hung up from her fifth call, she exhaled a sigh, deep and tired—for a moment, I could see every single one of her eighty six years etched out on her skin. My Arab, Muslim grandmother then spoke, unprompted, careful:

“He has cancer, and he’s all alone. He doesn’t have any family—they all left him, because he’s a homo.” She spoke that last word in English, and where I would have expected to hear an insult, I found compassion. “Even his siblings.” There was a long pause before her eyes met mine. “Shame on them all.”

That day, I was wearing pants so loose they hung low on my hips and a shirt so wide that, paired with a sports bra, it granted my body the illusion of flat. Last time I was dressed like this, someone called me a faggot. I had never said a word to her on the subject of sexuality, but as she hugged me back, I felt as seen as I could have ever hoped to be. Somehow, falling into the rhythm of being true to myself meant that now, who I am colors every movement I make. So I’d like to offer an alternative definition to the phrase coming out with the hope that it might create some peace to all of us who cannot rest being comfortably queer on the act of revealing it to the other:

coming out, as in the process of settling into yourself.

Author: The author of this piece chose to remain anonymous, but wished to share their story with the hope of creating connection where there is longing, and encouraging understanding where there is hesitation.