The Most Spiritually Aligned Thing I Ever Did
Four years ago today, I posted something that changed my life.
I remember sitting with it — reading it over and over, trying to figure out if I was really about to do this. I was terrified. I was also tired of carrying a lie. So I posted it.
On February 22, 2022, I came out as bisexual. Publicly. On the internet. To people I knew and people I didn’t. And I want to tell you what happened after that. The real version. Not the highlight reel. The first thing that happened was grief.
I wasn’t prepared for that part. I thought coming out would feel like exhaling. And it did — but it also cracked something open that I had been keeping sealed for a very long time. I started moving backward through my own life, looking at things differently. All the times I had called attraction admiration. All the times I had felt a pull toward a woman and filed it under she’s just a good friend. All the times something in me was speaking and I translated it into a language that felt safer.
I had spent so many years being good at being what everyone needed. Good daughter. Faithful wife. Present mother. Dependable friend. I had gotten so skilled at shapeshifting around other people’s comfort that I barely noticed how little space I was leaving for myself. Coming out didn’t just change what people knew about me. It made me sit down with the full weight of how long I had been doing that.
That kind of grief is quiet. It doesn’t come with fanfare. It mostly shows up late at night, when you’re alone with yourself and your own history. If you’re in the middle of that right now, I need you to hear me: you did not make the wrong choice. The grief is part of the real thing. It means you finally made a choice that was actually yours.
What I also didn’t expect was how much my coming out would change my relationship with God.
I grew up being taught that who I am is a sin. Lutheran schools, 4th grade through 12th. I was taught that being queer was a choice, that it was something that would separate me from God, that it was the kind of thing good girls didn’t do or feel or say. And even when I stopped believing that consciously, it was still living in my body. Still operating underneath everything.
So coming out publicly wasn’t just a social moment for me. It affected me on a deeply spiritual level.
I had to go into the stillness and ask myself a question I had been avoiding for years: do I actually believe I am loved as I am? Or only as I was told to be?
The answer came. Not all at once. But through journaling, through sitting quietly with God in a way I had never been taught, through the kind of clarity that shows up when you finally stop arguing with yourself — it came.
I am not an abomination. My love is not a sin. The very essence of God, as I understand her now, is woven into the love I have given and received as my whole self. I did not lose my faith when I came out. In fact, I grew closer to God than I had been in all my years of attend multiple church services a week. I shed the version of my faith that required me to disappear. And what grew in its place has been the most alive, most honest relationship with the divine I have ever experienced.
I grew closer to God, closer to myself, by telling the truth. That still moves me every time I think about it.
Four years later, here is what I know:
My queerness is not the most dramatic thing about me anymore. It is just part of the fabric. It explains things about me I spent years finding confusing — the way certain music cracked me open, the depth of the bonds I formed with women, the way I could feel a connection in my whole body and not know what to do with that information. It connects me to a lineage of women who refused to shrink, who chose truth over approval, who loved out loud even when it cost them something.
Coming out changed the question I make decisions from. I used to move through life asking how do I stay loved? Now I ask how do I stay honest? That is not a small shift. That shift is in everything — the boundaries I hold, the work I do, who I let close to me, how long I stay in rooms that ask me to make myself smaller. And then there is this community.
I did not know this was coming. I did not know that telling the truth about myself would create a space where other people felt safe enough to tell the truth about themselves. The women in my comments, in my DMs, in the community events I’ve hosted — you are not something I take for granted. You showed up. You witnessed me. And then you turned and witnessed each other. That is the thing about this work that I will never be able to fully put into words. We were not supposed to find each other. And we did anyway.
To the version of me sitting with that draft four years ago, reading it over and over, trying to figure out how to say it without saying too much of it — stop worrying and just post it, baby.
The people who are meant to love you for your truth will show up for your truth. And the ones who needed you to stay small? You were never really safe with them anyway, and some part of you already knew that. You have spent your whole life making yourself easier to hold. You are allowed to stop doing that. What you’re about to do is the most spiritually aligned thing you have done in years. Post it and don’t look back.
Today I am not in crisis.
I am not performing — nor am I waiting on anyone’s permission to take up space. I am still becoming and I regardless of how uncertain things may get, I am becoming from a place of truth now. From a place of wholeness. From a place that feels like home in a way nothing ever did when I was living divided.
This journey has been enlightening, painful, and beautiful. All three, fully, at the same time. And I am grateful for every part of it — including the hard parts, especially the hard parts — because they are what made this version of me possible.
Happy anniversary to me.
And if you are somewhere at the beginning of your own truth — scared, uncertain, holding something you haven’t said out loud yet — I wrote this for you too. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to stop hiding you from you.
The rest has a way of following.
I am in this with you.
I love you.
Writer’s Note: Today is the four-year anniversary of the day I came out publicly as bisexual. I wrote this as an offering to myself, and to anyone who is on a journey of their own becoming. Some of it is tender. All of it is honest.
With love, Chanel
Chanel is a Black queer writer and mother whose work centers personal narrative, spiritual deconstruction, and cultural commentary. She writes about identity, queerness, motherhood, and healing, with a focus on telling the truth without self-abandonment.