Awakening To My Truest Self

2019:  I am alone, drunk, hiding in my literal closet, and texting with a suicide prevention hotline.  I had been Googling gay bars to go to while my husband was out of town for work.  I hated myself more than ever.  I started seeing my therapist a few days later.  I took my last drink of alcohol soon after that.  

She brought me back from the brink.  We worked through complex PTSD from childhood, building self confidence, managing stress without numbing through alcohol.  But when she wanted to talk about the surface-level relationship I had with my husband, my best friend of 15 years, I shut down and made up an excuse to not see her again.  I couldn’t handle one more hard thing.  I knew the truth then.

I spend the next 3 years in awkward silence after I oblige him with intercourse for the first time in 6 months.  He continues to not question it.  We both keep pretending.  My existential depression gets worse.

I had my first ketamine infusion for treatment-resistant depression in December 2022.  I felt more joy and more love than I could’ve ever imagined.  I felt worthy of such things for the first time ever.  I knew perfect peace.  “This is what happens when you die,” I thought.

I experienced what is called an ego death.  The hard shell I’d grown to cope with the pain of self-hatred had dissolved away, and what was left was my most pure, authentic self.

On the way home, I couldn’t keep it together.  I sobbed uncontrollably.  I wanted him to take me to the ER, because I was afraid of hurting myself.  I didn’t want to be alone.  I didn’t trust myself.  

I finally spit out the words, “I think I’m bi.”  And even as I said “bi,” I knew what I really wanted to say was "gay.”  If I said “bi” that meant there was still a chance for us.  The truth was, I knew we’d been over for years.  And I think he knew too.

“I feel like I need to date women, but I also feel like I need to date men to figure this out.” I was scared and confused and overwhelmed.

“If you need to go away for the weekend, and do whatever with your friends, so be it,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand and look of disgust on his face.  He wanted me to hide myself.  I felt like he was ashamed of me.  I was already ashamed of me enough.  I felt like he wanted me to go off and be gay, but come home to him, so it wouldn’t affect his life, and he wouldn’t have to explain anything to his family.  But I wanted the partner that I knew I was supposed to have, and knew that she was out there and that I needed to make myself available if I ever had any chance at happiness.  

I was 39, about to live on my own for the first time, and losing my best friend of 19 years.  I was still grieving the loss of my dogs, almost 17 and 15 ½, who’d both passed in the last 4 months.

We saw a marriage counselor for one session.  “If he asked you to marry him today, what would you say?”  

“No, I can’t.”  I knew as much as I loved him, as much as I wanted to stay married and not break his heart, that my true happiness wasn’t here.  Not in this house, not in this marriage, to this man.  “I can’t stay married to you.”

He had been holding onto me so tightly these last few years, terrified of losing me.  I felt like I was suffocating, buried alive under layers of suppressed emotions.  Once I uttered those words, I started to see light poking through above me.  I felt like I didn’t dig my way out now, I might lose my nerve and back out.  

We went to the divorce attorney together.  “We just need to not be married anymore,” I said, looking down at five of my ten fingers bandaged from biting my fingernails and cuticles so much they bled.  I’d lost 10 lbs in a month.  

I wish I could say that we didn’t fight, but we did.  I wish I could say that I didn’t spend my evenings on the patio, smoking weed and talking to men on Bumble, but I did.  He was hurt, and I had hurt him.  On many levels.  That is my biggest regret.

I packed up what I would be taking to my new apartment in the city, and we avoided eye contact and conversation.  I looked at the two boxes in the closet, containing all the artifacts from our dogs’ lives over the last nearly 17 years, and decided that I couldn’t handle bringing that sorrow into my new life.  I had lost all 3 of my boys.

On June 1st, I walked into my new single-lady apartment and was so overcome with joy and gratitude that I knelt down in child’s pose right there in the kitchen and cried.  So happy, yet so heartbroken.  I distinctly heard the phrase, “This is where you heal.”

I spent the following six months in denial about my attraction to women, despite that being the very reason my marriage had ended.  I wasn’t ready for acceptance yet.  I went on date after date with any man I was remotely attracted to.  I had more one-night stands than I care to remember, in a desperate attempt to prove to myself that I could still be with men.

I continued my psychedelic medicine exploration, learning everything I could about how they work in the brain, and how to use them to unlearn all the things that society had told me I should be.  I purged years of pain and deeply repressed emotions through heaping sobs.  I forgave myself for causing him so much pain.  I told my inner child that she is loved, and I vowed to never forsake her again.  

Finally, in one particularly healing trip, the voice within asked me, “What are you so afraid of, Karie?  You are totally gay.”  And the biggest, widest smile spread across my face, and I let out a joyful giggle.  “You were made to love a woman.”  

That statement brought me so much peace.  All the things that I thought about myself during my marriage - I was unlovable, I was broken, I couldn’t figure out how to be happy, I’m not a sexual person - were because I was with the wrong person.  And that is neither me nor my husband’s fault.  

I’m in a much better place now, taking time to enjoy life on my own terms, and figuring out what I want this next chapter to look like.  I hope that I can find a woman who loves me as much as he did.