Finding the Right Life

It's more important to be alive than to be happy.

In what I somehow still didn’t know then would be the final days of my straight life, I made a list of the pros and cons of ending my marriage and coming out. On the positive side were the things I’d begun to see on the horizon as thrilling possibilities, but they were all amorphous and hypothetical, distant question marks. “A holistic sense of self,” I summed up, feeling simultaneously like that was the most important thing a person could want and that I was insane to consider throwing away everything I already had for it. Because the negatives, by contrast, were terrifyingly concrete, certain to commence within hours of making the decision: turning my life upside down and starting over, and all the psychological, social, and economic struggle that would entail.

By the time Pride month came around a year later, everything on both parts of the list had come to pass. Coming out had gone better than I foresaw; my family had taken it as well as could be expected, I had made more friends than I ever imagined having, and I finally felt, after years of always being an outsider, like I belonged. I had approached my assimilation into gay world with a fearlessness of which I hadn’t previously believed myself capable. There was so much more of everything, everything wonderful and awful and overwhelming; I couldn’t believe, from the other side, how etiolated my previous life had been, how I had survived so long inside it. At the same time, the cons manifested themselves almost as powerfully. There’s no way that losing everything you’ve known as your life can be anything but excruciating, especially losing the person you built that life with and knowing you’re the cause of their pain. On top of that, I was alone, alone in a way that made everything I’d previously regarded as loneliness seem unworthy of the name.

Once in a while during the first few months, I would try to draw up a kind of balance sheet to prove to myself that my new happiness outweighed my new sadness, that it had all been worth it. I was trying to survive in any way I knew how, I suppose, but it quickly became apparent that cost-benefit analysis was a category error, the wrong method for the experiment. My original pros-and-cons list had counterposed fundamental matters of selfhood and identity, that I could grasp only abstractly while still in the closet, to practical, everyday-life matters that are important but fungible, capable of being undone and redone as the deeper turns of life require. The question of whether it was “worth it,” and even of whether or not I was happy, was absurd.