I haven’t posted on this blog in over a year. I have no intention of coming back. I left for OpSec reasons in an active duty operational life. And for time reasons. I was spending way too much time here, and it wasn’t contributing to anything productive in my life outside the internet. Neither of those things have changed. I’m deploying sometime this year - I won’t say where or when or for how long, and my life as a physician, wife, and dogmom has not gotten any less busy or stressful.
I don’t miss most of this site. The scrolling felt more like an addiction to avoid reality than fulfilling in any meaningful way. The connection with a select few individuals was nice, but the rest took away from connection in my personal life. I don’t intend to come back. I don’t follow anyone anymore, and I don’t mindlessly scroll through places I want to travel or recipes I want to make, but never will.
But I wanted to say something about 2019. I wanted to write it down, and I wanted to write it here. I started this blog in 2009, meaning 2019 would have been a decade of sharing myself on this website. A LOT has changed in my life during that time, but I feel like change happened more so in 2019 than in any other year in the last decade. Maybe because I wasn’t here... or maybe that’s coincidental. Regardless, if you had showed me in 2018 what my life would look like in 2020, I would have been skeptical. Actually, I probably would have called you a liar or a comedian.
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I came out as bisexual to my husband (who was not my husband at the time) around 2012-ish. It may have been earlier. I don’t remember. We were living together, and it was something that had been looping in my brain on repeat for a long time - “How do I tell him when we’re this far into our relationship? He should know, but how do I say this now?” I don’t remember how I said it. I remember what he said in response, or at least the gist of it: It didn’t matter which genders I was attracted to. As long as I loved him, he loved me. This didn’t give me an excuse to have another relationship on the side. He didn’t care who came before or after him, as long as there was no one else at the same time as him, regardless of gender. Super fair. Deal.
We got married in 2013. Everything was great. For years everything was beautiful and glorious. We had a marriage that other people would have died for, a marriage that our friends told us they were jealous of. We had been together since 2007, and people couldn’t fathom how eight and nine years on we were still so happy together. And we were. We really were. Our relationship wasn’t a just facebook fairytale, designed only for external appearances. We were really, truly happy together.
I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know exactly when, but something changed. We still loved each other. We were still best friends. We were still family, but no family is perfect. The day he said the words, “I feel like I’m living with a roommate who happens to be my best friend instead of my wife,” I knew he was right. We had grown apart on an intimate level. We could still talk for hours, but the physical aspect of our relationship had disappeared entirely. Full disclosure - the last time we had sex was in 2016. That’s where we were at.
But we were also in no place to do anything about it. Half the time the military kept us physically apart. Half the time my job kept us physically apart. When we did have the chance to be together, I was too tired to be interested in anything. More than that, though, I wasn’t interested in him. More and more frequently, I found myself interested in the same gender. My identity swung from the bisexual midline of the Kinsey Scale to the farther end of the spectrum. I carried this secret and this guilt around inside me, and we kept living as we were. It’s not like we could have sex when we were in two different states anyway, and we were still really happy otherwise.
When I left for flight school in October of 2018, I finally realized how much our relationship had been weighing on me. It was the first time in years that I wasn’t working 100 hour weeks. It was the first time I had more than one day off per week. It was the first time there was a regulation that I HAD to get eight hours of sleep per night if I wanted to do my job. I had a lot of time to think, and I didn’t like the cyclic looping my brain was doing, similar to 2012. “How do I tell him when we’re this far into our relationship? He should know, but how do I say this now?”
There isn’t an easy way to tell your husband you’re not attracted to him. There isn’t a good time or a good place, but I knew it couldn’t be through texting or facetime. It was too big for that. Too important. So I waited until I saw him next- Christmas break, 2018. “Hey, so... you know how it’s been... almost three years since we had sex... yeah, umm... I’m not sure I’m straight. Like... at all.” He said, “I know. I think I’ve known for a while. I just didn’t know what to do about it.” We talked for a while and ended the conversation still not knowing what to do about it. A few days later I flew halfway across the country again. Still no point in making any drastic changes.
For two months I threw myself into my flight school work, but as it turns out, it still wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop my brain from perseverating on this. I took on class leadership roles. I interfaced with staff members no one else wanted to talk to. I spent as much time working, working out, and going out as I could. Nothing helped. People saw my over-zealous motivation, and they called me out for it. “Stop studying so much.” “Stop trying so hard.” I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t. It was the only way to keep my brain quiet.
In addition to chastising me, though, they also utilized my services. I was asked to advocate for a group of friends who wanted to switch their training wing command assignment (myself included in that group) to a wing that treats flight surgeons more kindly than the alternative command. The standards are very different between the two, and none of us wanted to suffer. I tried desperately to get us reassigned. I made phone calls, sent emails, scheduled appointments with course directors, and looked for extra spaces in the classes. I failed. I tried so hard that not only did I fail, I got in trouble with our academics director for trying to game the system. Oops. At least none of my classmates could say I didn’t give it my all.
The weekend before we all checked into the new command that none of us wanted, I was using my free time to google stories similar to what I was going through with my husband. What I wanted were stories of couples with one LGBTQ+ partner who divorced but continued to have a friendly, healthy, and involved relationship. I wanted reassurance that we could end what we had and still be happy together in some capacity, even if it wasn’t as husband and wife. Fun fact: there are not many of those stories. I found one. One and only one. It was in a Ted Talk given by a Christian pastor who’s life was upended when he decided to come out as gay. He lost his job and a lot of friends, his house and stability, but with a lot of respect and effort and compassion, he and his wife were able to maintain a friendship. He was it- my only hope. If they could do it, maybe we could too. But how? The Ted Talk didn’t go into details.
I sent him a twitter message hoping for some advice. I honestly did not expect a response. People who give Ted Talks don’t just respond to random twitter strangers. Yet he did, and he was compassionate and empathic about my story. He dropped his phone number, and said if I ever wanted to chat about it, I should give him a call. Let’s just say I was a little creeped. I identify as agnostic, but I’ve been skeptical of organized religion since I left the Catholic Church in my early teens. Additionally, internet strangers who give out their phone numbers just scream of red flag warnings. Here was a random internet stranger who also happened to be a pastor who was giving me his number with only one message between us. I was honestly convinced that if I called him I would end up kidnapped in a conversion cult or something.
I talked to a friend about it. She knew some details of what I was going through, and I asked her if she thought I should call him. She said, “What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a phone call. If he’s creepy, hang up on him.” So I did, and he wasn’t. It was awkward, but somehow so natural. It was like he knew exactly what I was feeling because he had felt it all before. He wasn’t pushy about his theology, but he also told me I should talk to someone professional. A priest or counselor or therapist - someone to help me work through what I was feeling. I was anxious about that, with our current political climate and the fact that I work in the military. Medical seemed out, because I wasn’t just about to drop a controversial topic in a clinic visit with the flight surgeons who would be my future peers. The chaplains also seemed risky. How could I be sure they weren’t of a theological background that would state, simply, that I’m going to hell for these thoughts?
He reassured me that my concerns were valid. I was navigating a touchy subject in a risky environment, but it was an issue that was going to exhaust me if I didn’t address it. He said something like, “You’re treading water right now, and you’re doing alright. You’re caught between two islands, and you can choose to swim to either. Until you choose which way to swim, you’re just going to keep expending energy keeping yourself afloat. Someday, you may not have the energy to keep going. You have to choose to swim, whether that’s toward your marriage or away from it, or eventually you’re going to drown here.” As much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was right.
The same day that I spoke with him, we begrudgingly checked in to our new training command. The check in process included a day of briefs - from the class officer, the CO, XO, and the command Chaplain. The Chaplain’s brief consisted almost exclusively of rehashing the military’s Chaplain Confidentiality Regulations. I had known the Chaplains had ultimate, unlimited confidentiality privileges, but I had never really internalized it before. Perhaps because it had never been relevant before. I had no reason to care, until suddenly, a reason presented itself.
Turns out, this Chaplain also brought free pizza for lunch on Tuesdays. Pizza was in an hour. Normally I, the agnostic ex-Catholic who actively dislikes organized religion, would avoid every interaction possible with the Chaplain, but free pizza, and my unrelenting anxiety about my relationship, won me over. My class sat and chatted with him for an hour over Domino’s, and much to my surprise, he was actually kind of a cool guy. He gave us all his cell phone number and encouraged us to call or text if we ever needed anything. All these religious folks just kept throwing their numbers at me.
I went home and tried to process what was happening in my life - how in so few days so many opportunities presented themselves to talk about something I had been holding on to for years. No homework yet, nothing to do that night, a whole lot of time to think, a shit ton of anxiety about my future, and I went to bed not knowing how I felt about anything, aside from “not good.” That was also how I slept that night. Not good. Everything was not good. Not good. Not good. Not good. The next day I texted the Chaplain.
We set up an appointment for that Friday, March 8th. I panicked. I sent him another text asking about his views on LGBTQ+ individuals. I told him I wanted to have a productive conversation, and I wasn’t going to come if this wasn’t going to work. His response was lengthy, honest, and respectful. It touched on his personal views, the views of his church, and recent news media surrounding his denomination. He ended by saying if I wasn’t comfortable speaking with him after learning about his background, he would find me someone that I would be comfortable with. His honesty and openness surprised me, so I went ahead with meeting him.
He started our conversation by asking my preferred pronouns, which in light of my text and outward appearance was reasonable, but also still surprising for a clergy person to open with. Like the pastor on the phone, he wasn’t pushy with theology, and he listened to my current situation with openness and respect. He challenged me and forced me to consider difficult questions. He was sassy, stubborn, and wouldn’t let me ostrich away from my problems. Like the pastor on the phone, he told me I was out of sand to stick my head in.
He dug deeper into my personal history than I had expected. I admitted that I had been to therapy previously, but had always quit or been dis-enrolled for not engaging. I admitted that there were other things I was struggling with besides my sexuality, but I didn’t want to open those boxes from my past. He asked me about the things I had been through, and when I refused to answer his questions, he ended the appointment. He said, “Alright Doc, using your own language, when you decide you want to stop treating the emotional symptoms of this, and treat the actual problem instead, you can come back and talk to me again.” He stood up, shook my hand, and showed me to the door. He was kind, but firm. That was an ultimatum.
I was livid. Honestly, I was. How dare he! How dare he say I can’t talk about my marriage and sexual identity without talking about every other thing I’ve been through?! How can he decide what I get to say in his office? Who gave him the right to determine what will or will not help me?!
I went home, and I complained to my husband on the phone. His response made me even more angry. “Honestly? I think he’s right. How many times have you been through this - in and out of therapy, never willing to discuss your past. He’s right. I’m on his side.” We said goodbye, and I hung up angry. I vented to my roommate, who had survived intern year with me. He sat me down and said, “Remember that patient you had last year, the one with diabetes who’s A1c was too high to be detectable by the lab? Remember how you kept prescribing him more and more insulin, but he would never take it? Remember how frustrated you were every 5 weeks when he came in for follow up, having had toes amputated, worsening kidney function, still not taking his medicine, but wanting you to fix him? You’re being that patient. You expect this Chaplain to solve all your problems, but you’re not willing to participate.” Damn.
Honestly, I was pissed at them all. Why was everyone ganging up on me?! I wanted sympathy. I wanted people to take my side and tell me how mean the Chaplain was for treating me like that. His sass was so uncalled for, and yet, everyone was agreeing with him! Rude. I went to bed angry, but I woke up the following morning with a sinking sense that they all might be on to something. At this point, my relationship was so distressing that I was willing to do just about anything to feel better. The phone pastor was right - I was treading water, and I was getting tired.
That night, I had plans to see Captain Marvel. It was opening weekend, and our other roommate had bought us assigned seat tickets to see it in IMAX. We got to the theater, walked to our seats, and guess who had the assigned seat next to us? It was the Chaplain - the very same one that I had dumped my sexual history on just 24 hours previously, the one who had politely kicked me out of his office until I was willing to talk about my shit, the one I was still sort of vaguely angry at for reasons I couldn’t fully comprehend. He was just sitting there, alone, in the theater, in his assigned seat that just so happened to be next to ours. We made eye contact. Recognition. I didn’t say anything. Neither did he. But, still panicking about it, I texted my friend who had the seat directly next to him. She struck up a conversation, and that was the end of that.
We all went out for drinks afterward, and my friends invited the Chaplain. It was so. fucking. awkward. For me at least. Everyone else seemed to have a great time. He’s a really cool guy, our age, same rank, similar interests, and fun to hang out with, as my roommates kindly reminded me. I was being overly harsh about the whole situation. We could have been friends under any other circumstances, but I was so full of shame that I couldn’t even look at him.
Still, I showed up for free Pizza the next Tuesday, and we met two more times that week. On the third session, we opened the trauma boxes from my past. I still don’t know why I did it. Maybe I felt like I could trust him and his confidentiality contract. Maybe his sass or similarity to me in age made it feel less clinical. Maybe I was just at a point so low that it didn’t matter how much worse it made me feel. Regardless of the why, we talked about my father and the abuse in my family growing up. We talked about my eating disorder and self-harm through middle school and high school. We talked about my sexual assault. We didn’t talk about any of it in detail, but we opened the boxes, dumped all the shit on the floor, and tried to come up with a way to clean it up.
He admitted that he was out of his element. His training as a Chaplain prepared him to be a counselor, but he didn’t have formal trauma therapy training. He wanted to help, but he was stepping a little out of his lane trying to do so. He encouraged me to see an actual therapist, either through the military mental health system, Fleet and Family, or out in town. I was afraid of the ramifications on my career as a Flight Surgeon, military officer, and physician in general, so I refused each time he brought it up. Instead, I allowed him to anonymously liaise with the counselors at Fleet and Family on my behalf, and we managed to do a kind of therapy by proxy, with books and home writing assignments. Not the ideal situation for any of us involved, but somehow it worked.
I talked about things I had never mentioned to another living human. We slowly made progress in my ability to address the issues of my past. Unfortunately, I also decompensated outside of sessions. I relapsed on a lot of poor coping mechanisms. I had flashbacks and nightmares. I lost 20lbs in less than two months. I drank a lot. I cut myself for the first time in over a decade. The problems we worked through encompassed so much more than my sexuality and my relationship. We cut right to the core of my identity. It was not something I saw coming, not something I wanted, but something I clearly needed regardless.
Somehow, we also ended up talking about my faith. I guess when you do therapy with the Chaplain, it’s bound to come up at some point. We addressed why I left the church, why I was so skeptical of organized religion, and why I kept refusing to join a friend every Sunday when she invited me to go to church with her. He was still incredibly respectful of my beliefs, steadfast in his own, and not pushy about changing how I felt.
After months of her asking, on Palm Sunday, I agreed to accompany my friend to church. Suffice it to say, the experience was awful. She went to a modern, non-denominational church in a theater with a rock band and a smoke machine. There was no liturgy, a sermon that did more harm than good, and far too much sobbing about personal conversion stories in front of the microphone. I texted the Chaplain in an outrage.
When we met that week, he invited me to his Easter service the following Sunday. I told him that wasn’t going to happen. I’d had enough church in that one service to make up for the last 15 years that I had missed. He said he understood, but that his service would not be anything like the one I attended with my friend, the invite would remain open, and also he’s “a damn good preacher.” Somehow that sentence, like the one at the end of our first meeting, pushed all my buttons. How dare he have the arrogance to say that? And how can I know for sure whether or not he is or isn’t “a damn good preacher” unless I go to confirm? It was a veiled challenge. Rude.
For some inexplicable reason, probably a mix of curiosity and spite, I went to his church service that Sunday. Much to my chagrin, his arrogance was well earned. He is, in fact, a damn good preacher. He gave the first feminist retelling of the Easter story that I have ever heard. He used the line, “nevertheless, she persisted,” - bold words to put in a sermon on a military base where 80% of your congregation is comprised of white, male, republicans.
He invited me out for brunch afterward, an experience that proved to be one of the most awkward interactions of my life. He wore his clergy collar, on Easter Sunday, in a packed restaurant - a man who knew literally everything about me, including how uncomfortable religion made me. Despite the discomfort, it was an enjoyable meal, and it proved to be a very interesting start to the transition our relationship was about to undergo.
We, through fates that were out of both of our hands, happened to be assigned upcoming orders to the same base. I would be a Flight Surgeon following my PCS that May. He would be our Chaplain beginning that December. We would be forced into a situation where we were equal rank coworkers, with a similar mission of keeping our service members healthy. We would be coworkers who shared a patient population and command meetings. I think we both recognized that we couldn’t continue what we were doing and maintain a professional boundary in that setting. Additionally, we both fully admitted that I needed a provider who was actually trained in trauma therapy.
So we spent time discussing the continuity of my care after my PCS, and also how we could continue our professional relationship as friends and coworkers when the foundation of our relationship had been formed with him as my therapist. You’re not supposed to be friends with your therapist. There’s a power differential that complicates things. Well, the military has a tendency to complicate things as well, so you figure out how to adapt and overcome. We compiled a list of therapists in our soon to be local area, and we started our friendship with brunch.
I kept going to his church services as well, every week until I PCS’d at the end of May. I didn’t believe in his god or his doctrine, but his sermons were compelling and rang true with my ideologies on a scale larger than Christianity. Themes included the difficult family dynamics that can arise from referring to god as “our father,” how human ideas of gender can constrict and restrict a god who’s ultimately greater than anything we can comprehend, and gratitude for the human community - that none of us can exist in isolation, that respect for all people, even those we view as wholly different from us, is necessary as they contribute to our survival, and that their existence, however much at odds with our own, is vital to our own humanity.
I started to question exactly what had driven me away from religion, and whether or not I felt like it was missing in my life. When I did eventually leave the area, I tried to find something to replace that Sunday ritual in my new hometown, but I never fully succeeded. I went to a different church every Sunday - Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Non-Denominational, Unitarian Universalist, Christian Missionary Alliance, even a Korean led service by one of the local military Chaplains. I would have branched out more, but I felt uncomfortable walking into spaces I was unfamiliar with. There’s an Orthodox church, a Synagogue, a Buddhist temple, a Mosque, and a Hindu temple in the local area that I could have attended, but didn’t feel I properly knew how to do so while respecting the people who did consider those places their spiritual homes.
I read 15 books by different religious leaders, countless essays, biographies, histories of monasteries, seminaries, and major landmarks in world religions. I watched Ted Talks and movies, listened to podcasts and became a fan of multiple Christian bands (in a Spotify playlist I have lovingly titled “Tolerable Songs about Jesus”), and finished large parts of multiple religious texts. I’ve gone out of my way to meet my new base’s Chaplains, and I’ve realized that there are some Chaplains that I will never interface well with. Not all Chaplains are like the one I met in flight school. I got lucky when I met him on my first day at the training command I didn’t want to go to - the training command I tried so hard to get out of attending that I was reprimanded for it. He would argue it wasn’t luck. I’m not sure I’m convinced of that.
That Chaplain, who I now call my friend, and I talked on the phone about once every two weeks while we lived in two different time zones. We talked religion and politics, his family and upcoming wedding, our hobbies and tastes in music and movies. He spent a week at my house in November while he looked for a place to live here, and in December he finally carried out his orders to our local area. He has quickly become one of my husband’s and my best friends.
I now have a trauma therapist that I see for two hours a week. I’m working on integrating my past with my present to feel congruent with my identity. I still haven’t figured out who I am or what’s happening to my marriage, but my husband and I go to marriage counseling for two hours a week as well. Once a week, I go to a different church, and we get brunch afterward, where I complain about the parts of the service or the sermon that were not up to my standards. Sometimes, our friend comes along and complains about problems in his own church.
If you had told me in 2018 that by 2020 I would have graduated from flight school with honors and awards, inherited a squadron and held my own as their solo provider, survived 6 weeks of training in 112 degree desert heat, prepared for an upcoming deployment in a chaotic world climate...and also told my husband that I’m not sure our sexual identities are compatible, considered the possibility of divorce, called a random LGBTQ+ Ted Talk speaker, discussed all the trauma from my past, relapsed into a load of bad habits from earlier in my life, and found two different therapists that I see twice a week - if you had told me I’d be going to church every Sunday, my reading list had transitioned from Sci-Fi and Fantasy to Philosophy, History, and Religion, that I would have Christian music playlists, and that I would consider a Chaplain to be one of my best friends, I would not have believed any of it. I would have laughed at you. I would have called you a liar.
Still, here we are. I continue to be confused about who I am and where my life is going. This last year certainly hasn’t made it any clearer. In fact, it seems to have completely altered the path I’ve been following. Somehow, that’s ok though. It’s been a completely unexpected adventure.
Spiritually, I still feel like there’s something missing. I’m not sure what it is I’m searching for yet, but I’m sure I haven’t found it. Is it a community of likeminded individuals? An intellectually stimulating lecture? A feeling? A relationship with the divine? Peace? Forgiveness? My identity? Something else entirely? I’m not sure. Maybe a little of all of that combined.
I think the only substantial change I’ve experienced through all of this is that somehow, in some way, I’m now ok with not knowing. My identity isn’t any different than it was at the end of 2018. My relationship status hasn’t changed. My spiritual and political views haven’t been widely altered. My future is still as uncertain as it was a year ago, but I don’t feel as awful having to sit with it now. It is what it is, I don’t know how it will end up, and that’s ok. I couldn’t have predicted 2019, but some incredible things happened anyway.
I think if I just let change come, instead of forcing the future into what I want it to be, everything just might work out alright.
