The Grief of Becoming

My story opens in the Indian Ocean, where I leap impulsively into deep water chasing the wonder of swimming with manatees, only to watch Captain Coconut drive boat away from me. Suspended between panic and awe, I learn that survival in open water requires something more than skill; it requires surrender.  It requires listening deeply to your body.  It requires presence.  Years later, that same lesson returns when I find myself standing in a circle of improvisers prior to our class singing Pink Pony Club, tears falling as I realize a truth I can no longer outrun: I am an improviser, a mother, and LGBTQ. Saying it aloud the next morning to my partner of twenty years — on the way to his oncology appointment after months of heart problems and fear — becomes its own kind of plunge, one that reveals a quiet truth no one tells you about becoming yourself: transformation is braided with grief.

As my marriage gently unravels, my partner battles illness, our farm empties of its livestock, and my world reshapes itself, a new landscape, I begin to recognize the pattern. Coming out feels like swimming in open water — disorienting, vast, lonely, beautiful. Just as I once entered the ocean many times before, I trusted my breath enough to see what lived beneath the surface. I learn trusting my intuition is not a single leap but a practice. My story closes where it began: floating on in the ocean, choosing to listen inward, watching the horizon widen. I understand then that grief and joy are not opposites but companions, and that the only way to become fully alive is to enter the water and trust yourself to breathe.  To be yourself.  To be fully expressed.

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