There is no normal life, Wyatt. There’s just life. So get on with it.

Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, Tombstone (1993)

Yesterday was my birthday. I’m 35 now, an age I did not imagine I would ever reach when I was a child. To be honest, I imagined very few things for myself that involved anything real. I imagined being a superhero, or a space explorer, or an underground outlaw doing right by the downtrodden. I never imagined a normal life for myself. Never pictured myself married or parenting or growing old, because I would not be there for those things. I didn’t want to be dead when I grew up, exactly; I just knew with a certainty I never questioned that I would not live past 25.

I’m told this is a shared experience for a lot of Queer kids, especially those of us who could recognize and label our Queerness for what it was and who never saw happy, thriving, living Queer adults in any of the media they consumed or the communities they lived in. My experience was a little apart from that specific one; I didn’t “know I liked girls”, I just knew I wasn’t the same as the rest of the people around me. I never consciously connected my certainty that survival past 25 wasn’t in the cards with a specific part of my identity. Whether that means this shared certainty transcends our early access to terms for our Queerness, or whether that means it stems from some other space, that I don’t know.

Regardless. The best decade of my life is the one I lived after I woke up at 25 and kept on waking up every day thereafter. It’s like I woke up that day and, given that I was now apparently alive for the long haul, I gave myself permission to create the best possible life out of the rich vein of time I’d just uncovered. I got married and had a child and stumbled face-first into my life’s work as an anti-racist educator, as an activist. I found the safety and freedom to finally name the difference I carried through the first quarter-century of my life, to finally call myself Queer.

I dug deep into therapy and medicated the illness that tried very hard to kill me when I was twenty. I built boundaries by brute force and walked away when people couldn’t keep them. I realized nobody had ever taught me how to be a decent spouse, and I grabbed my wife’s hand and said Teach me, show me, we have to learn this because I have to live now and I’m not doing it without you. I realized all the ways I didn’t know how to avoid my parent’s mistakes, and I found people to teach me and books to fill my gaps because I’m going to live now, and I refuse to live with doing less than right by my child.

I realized the world wasn’t going to end in the religious catastrophe I’d been assured, and that God was not going to fantastically intervene in the injustice around me, and I said okay well fuck it, I have to live here and I’m not leaving it like this. Which maybe, I’ve realized over the last decade of living, is the only kind of intervening in the world’s injustice that anything or anybody ever did to begin with.

My life after 25 is blessedly, outrageously Queer and ferociously, happily normal. It’s the life I — a kid who daydreamed like I was on the goddamned clock doing it, a child with vivid imagination scrawled on her entire general person — didn’t have the imagination to construct for myself, until the day I suddenly did.

I imagined it and I built it and now I get to live in it, for however long it happens to last.

And that is a hell of a thing.

I almost had the conversation with my parents half a dozen times. When my mother responded to a magazine article including a lesbian couple’s wedding photo with “Ugh, gross.” When the Supreme Court ruled for equal marriage. When it became clear in 2016 that my parents and people like them had successfully put evil men who hated my people in power.

Every time, I walked myself back from the decision. It would not bring me joy, or closure, or a miracle change of heart in these people who I loved but could not trust. It would not make things better.

And my parents were, if not perfect, still people who I loved and could not quite imagine losing. They were mostly good grandparents to my child, who adored them. They were willing to listen to me when I laid down boundaries about what kind of things I wouldn’t tolerate being said around my family. It was painful, imperfect, but enough.

But things change. In our case, my spouse began her medical and social transition. And from the moment she told me she was pretty sure she wasn’t a man, I knew our imperfect balance with my parents was no longer acceptable. Maybe it never had been.

I was ready to tell them that day, but it was several very long months before I finally did. I waited until my wife was ready, because it was ultimately as much her story as mine. I talked to her, to my friends, to my therapist.

Eventually, I wrote my parents a letter. I told them I was bisexual, that my wife was a trans woman, that we would be staying married, that our child already knew and was adjusting well. I invited them to stay part of our lives if they could do it with love and respect, that I’d answer questions if they were asked respectfully, that I wanted them to take time if they needed it.

My father responded by texting me a verbally abusive message as soon as they received the letter. I blocked his number and set up filters so that emails, if he sent them, would be set aside until I was able to cope with them.

My mother said nothing for weeks. We had previously spoken every single day on the phone for at least a few minutes. Eventually she made a sporadic attempt to re-establish contact, but she did it by refusing to discuss the subject of my family or her silence. Eventually, I told her I wasn’t going to pretend things were unchanged between us. That was the last conversation we had.

I don’t know if they’ll change. I don’t believe that they will. A certain breed of American religion takes up too much space in the fabric of their lives. They are not people inclined to reconsider their positions. I sometimes wonder how I, raised by them, managed to become one.

But I was so fucking tired by the time I came out. I was tired of the labor involved in maintaining enough of an edited version of myself for them to love. I was tired of stress dreams and catastrophizing. I was ready to get on with the life I had built.

I am openly Queer with my friends, in my public teaching and writing, in the way I present to strangers. I love the life I have, the one my wife and I share, and I’m honestly done with wasting energy on trying to keep people in it who can’t love the people we actually are.

It’s still painful. I can’t imagine a universe in which it wouldn’t have been. I’m immensely glad that I didn’t come out when I was younger and more hopelessly dependent on my parents’ approval for my emotional well-being. As it stands, I’m surrounded by people every day who remind me that the person I really am is worthy of loving and knowing wholly — and that is a beautiful relief.

I didn’t come out to my parents as a child, although I was a Queer child, because I lived in an environment that had been meticulously scrubbed of any language I could have used to understand myself and what I felt. My aunt lived with a woman, a Butch truck driver with whom my aunt had a mutual subscription to The Advocate. I knew the word “lesbians” because Ellen had been on television. But my aunt had been married to men in the past, and lesbians hated men.

I didn’t come out to my parents as a teenager, although I was a Queer teenager, because religion had become the only framework on which stability in my household was constructed. Gay was something men were sometimes tempted to be, but it was a wrong choice to make (and oh, I was a very good girl who made as few wrong choices as possible, there was so very little room for wrong choices in my world). Lesbian was something women were if they hated men (and it was a choice you would someday walk back, as my aunt had walked back from the woman with strong hands and a cigarette voice who was never mentioned again). There was no word for both. And if feelings stirred in my guts, if my heart twisted up at a boy’s smile or the way he laughed, that was just Temptation. When the same feeling twisted my heart at the way a girl’s hair fell oh just so while she was praying, it was the Spirit of the Lord stirring me at her devotion, and if I wanted to follow her like a lost puppy it was because someday, I wanted to be just like her.

I didn’t come out to my parents as a young adult because they had made it clear how disgusting gay people were, and even if I now had somehow fluttered into a better frame of mind, how could I risk making them so angry? It wasn’t as if I was gay. Just sometimes overcome with longing for a girl’s company, sometimes breathless at how good she was or how her smile made things shine. But I would date a man, someday, and marry a man, someday, and then someday came along and that question was surely settled.

I didn’t come out to my parents at thirty, even though I had words now that I wasn’t afraid to use for myself — bisexual, Queer, gay as fuck — even though I used them riotously and joyously and even though I wanted wanted wanted to wrap my community around myself and screech with joy for finally having things (so many things) make sense. Because I still knew that conversation would lead me nowhere fast.

Because they did not stop being the people who taught me from the first day of my life that good choices were what I was expected to make. Because I heard enough contempt and disgust in their voices along the way of a thirty-five-year journey with them to know what they would say. Because somehow without any words on the subject passing between us I knew we will love you no matter what is a lie at least as often as it is the truth.

Because I did not owe it to them to be the Good Queer that would make them reconsider. I did not owe them the self-flagellation of a conversation that would only hurt me and bring me no joy or closure.

So I did not come out to my parents when I was nine, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty. I did not come out to my parents.

Until I did.