It’s Not a Failure, It’s a Rebirth: On Coming Out at Age 39

Guest post by Allison Williamson

Welcome to all the new subscribers! It was a real pleasure to collaborate with fellow writers

Andra Watkins

and

Stephen Robinson

last week, and share in our mutual concern for the direction of state and national politics. This week I’m delighted to host my good friend, Allison Williamson. Allison owns Bohème salon in Greenville, and it’s a lovely, inclusive space that also does the best hair around (seriously, people come from out of town for appointments). Knowing her has been such a blessing as I navigate my own middle life. Here’s her story.

My life started all over again at 38. Not that I didn’t have a life before—I lived quite a life actually. I took risks, I explored things, I had an artist mentality. Until I didn’t. I “grew up”. But about the age of 38, something happens to most of us inching towards mid-life, that starts calling you to step into your true self. You start to shed away the expectations of society, your parents, your peers. You start to look around and realize everything you’ve built, everything you’ve created can be and maybe should be different.

I left a relationship of almost 20 years, one most people would think of as the ideal situation. I had a loyal husband, two beautiful healthy children, a home, a dog, a cat, a successful career. All things to check off to be happy. But I wasn’t completely happy, and this was my turning point.

I’ve always felt there was something wrong with me, that this would explain why I wasn’t content with everything that I had strived for and that life so generously offered me. The truth is I wasn’t being honest with myself: this “ideal life” wasn’t the life for me. My drive to be liked and accepted by my peers and family had led me to turn away from my sexual diversity, from my less conventional self. The temptation to follow the American Dream masked my true self. While I acknowledge my privilege and am grateful for what I’ve had, it didn’t mean I had fully stepped into my full being.

When I started on this journey, starting over from scratch in November of 2019 seemed like the hardest thing I could do. I had just started a business and it was hard to scrape together enough money to get my own place. Then the pandemic hit.

Like so many others, all of my dreams and aspirations I had set out to achieve, this life I had been building, came to a screeching halt. Time was frozen. I was now a divorced, partly single parent, schoolteacher to two young children, and navigating facilitating an entire staff through unemployment and shut downs. So I did what most people who were so overwhelmed during shut down did. I drank every day starting at noon, tried to pursue dating way too soon midst a time where everyone was shut in. I put my head in the sand about a lot of very important things, every day pulling myself by the bootstraps to get through what was happening to the world, to my family, to my business. Imagining how wildly different it could be. Struggling every day with guilt and fear.

When the world started to open back up again, I really dug into recovering myself. I was in therapy several times a month, seeking out various healers, nutritionists and support from strong women in my life. I dove back into spirituality, art and any other form of healing that was available to me. If you’ve done any truly deep work, or great lengths of introspection, you would think that very quickly you will feel lighter, better and relieved at what you found. But what truly happens when you go inside is your world is flipped upside down. You question everything you were taught to know about the world and yourself and it all becomes a hurricane of emotion and struggle and deep sadness. One constant did emerge, however: there are truly no rules on how to live. There’s no one way, there’s no right way if no harm is being done to yourself or others. Move abroad, live wildly and without obligation perhaps.

My final healing point was when I came out as a queer woman openly to everyone in my life at 39, when I finally felt the reassurance, the final puzzle piece if you will, when I truly set a new direction for myself. I found a confidence I had suppressed in myself, in my body and in my relationships with women. I have always been, and will forever always advocate for women to find their confidence and power that we have suppressed for far too long. And I will now and forever do what I can to help support others finding their power.  

I’d love for this to be a piece about how I built a brand-new life that gave me everything my newfound outlook desired. But truth is there are still constraints and obligations that keep me tethered to that prior existence. I still strive every day.

I tell this story because I think there are others who’ve done the work, set out to have fulfillment, exploration of different ideas of living, inching our way, but are not quite there yet. There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling unhappy in a life you have created intentionally because it all can be different at any moment and it can all come crumbling down and be rebuilt again and again and again. There’s nothing wrong with starting over. It’s not a failure, it’s a rebirth.

Although I know there is still so much work to do and I’m not quite clear from the chains of my past, I have found a supportive partner and a community of women I have collected in support of each other. I have two amazing children who’ve seen my struggles and seen my fight to recover what I am in this world. I have a new home I worked so hard to purchase and restore. I have traveled to destinations I’d like to move to.

I’m still here pulling my bootstraps fighting for my way to get to the life I imagine. As many of you are. I see you, I am you, we are all.

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