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It was early 2009, President Obama was in the White House, and optimism was in the air. I’d just turned 30 and knew something good was about to happen to me. At a barbecue in Los Angeles, where I was living and missing New York, I met a gregarious man in flip-flops and a seventies ski jacket, with a promise of adventure in his eyes. Ben turned out to be an actor in town from the East Coast. We bonded over our love of sketch comedy and marijuana. A couple of nights later, we were sitting on his friend’s porch, watching the night sky and dreaming up a television pilot about a grown man still living with his parents. Within months, we were sharing a Brooklyn apartment, living in a blissful cloud of pot smoke and domesticity.
We got married quickly. I adored his irreverent humor, and our creative synergy held my tendency toward anxiety at bay. I felt a sense of security with him, a sense of family—though we were in no hurry for children. It was working together that gave us joy and excitement. We made a couple of low-budget shorts, and one day, on a bike ride across the Williamsburg Bridge, we came up with an idea for High Maintenance, a series about New Yorkers connected by a weed-delivery guy, played by Ben. I’d been working as a casting director and immediately roped in friends as well as actors we’d seen perform in plays and wanted to know better. I��ll never forget the rush of hearing an actor speak the words I had written when we shot the first episode in a Brooklyn hotel room.
Before long, critics were paying attention—even as our married life began to lose its footing. Ben and I were now spending nearly all our waking hours together, and there was an airlessness between us, a sense of codependency, which brought strain. We started bickering, falling into a loop of arguing and crying and making up. Then we’d smoke pot to numb the pain and return to goofing around and writing scripts.
Sometimes we would take camping trips and have a magical time, only to find ourselves fighting again back home. Our coping mechanism was to treat our discord as fodder for the show. Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. We were happiest on set, when we were creating together.
A couple of years into High Maintenance, when we had signed our first script deal with a cable network and I should have been celebrating, something inside me shut off. One day, I could barely get out of bed and I couldn’t stop crying. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety all my life, but this was different. Ben and my best friend, Russell, called a therapist and practically dragged me to her office. Between doses of Wellbutrin and my regular sessions, I was able to function. And yet a sense of dread lingered in the background of my thoughts like white noise.
Around this time, Ben was becoming something of a Brooklyn celebrity. When we rode the subway or went out for dinner, people would approach him, and I stood off to the side. He was the face of our professional partnership, while most of my work happened behind the scenes. Had I been in a healthier mind-set, his recognition wouldn’t have bothered me. After all, establishing Ben’s acting career was part of what we’d originally set out to do. Yet I started to feel invisible. One night I went out with a filmmaker I’d met at a party. We talked about a potential collaboration over more drinks than I like to admit. It was late when we left the bar, a cold spring night. Instead of going home, I followed her into her taxi, and for the first time in five years, I found myself in bed with a woman.
I wish I could say my behavior surprised me. What was surprising, though, was that even though I cheated on my husband with a woman, and even though my first sexual experiences were with girls, and even though I had had encounters with women in my 20s, I still considered the episodes to be aberrations. I believed my indiscretion was a mistake and blamed too many margaritas. It was more palatable to me that way.
You might say self-acceptance has never been my strong suit. But struggling to feel comfortable with the natural order of things goes back as far as I can remember. As a child, I would lie in bed churning with worry. If the wind was blowing, I’d become convinced that the gate was about to blow down and my dog would run away. Other nights, my thoughts would turn existential and I’d fixate on dark notions and the idea of sin.
I grew up in a suburb of Long Beach, California, a quiet port town where The Queen Mary is docked. My parents moved there from Denmark in the 1970s for my father’s work at a shipping company. Our neighborhood was home to a hodgepodge of communities, from Orthodox Jews to Mexican immigrants. It was the evangelical Christians who recruited my lonely immigrant mother to join their Bible-study group. At age five I was speaking in tongues, and I was baptized in a backyard swimming pool. My parents sent me to an evangelical school where we were taught that being nice is better than being honest, and being gay was a transgression against God. When my favorite uncle came out to my family, I sobbed, devastated that he was going to suffer an eternity in hell.
Meanwhile, my grade-school friends and I occasionally made out on playdates. When my mother discovered us, she’d scold me, but I didn’t think kissing made anyone gay. It was simply misbehavior, I thought, and became something of an expert at rationalizations—inventing stories to restore my calm. Lying to ourselves is something we all do—we tell ourselves that our job isn’t tedious, that one more glass of wine at the end of the night won’t hurt. Surrounded by messages that my desires were wrong, I constructed blind spots and prisms. “Self-deception remains the most difficult deception,” Joan Didion once wrote in this magazine. “The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: No winning smiles will do here.” In my case, however, I found ways, over and over again, to fool myself. I never made it a point to hold myself accountable.
In junior high school, when one of my friends and I touched each other in the dark, I told myself I was just practicing for a boyfriend. She and I kept carrying on, laughing until we lost our breath, staying up late watching videos from Blockbuster. My sophomore year I took up with a boy, a handsome water-polo player from my church youth group. I gave myself over to the relationship with no hesitation, excited to be a normal teenage girl. The only thing that failed to excite me was the sex.
I didn’t tell anyone what we were doing, not even my closest friends. At my school, “good” girls were the popular ones. Our homecoming queen was an honors student who spent school breaks helping children in impoverished countries. I remained quiet and let my shame fester, eventually manifesting as recurring stomach pain that no doctor could diagnose. My mother accompanied me on endless appointments, where I was instructed to stay away from coffee and spicy food to temper the burning. This charade would go on for nearly two decades. I became extremely well versed in antacids.
Once I left high school, it became clear to me that people would accept my attraction to women so long as I presented it as a fetish, a penchant for the forbidden. The men I dated—even a man I was married to for a blink during my early 20s—took my predilection in stride. In fact, some of them seemed to like it.
There was a moment during my first marriage when I questioned whether my so-called curiosity was something more. I had fallen for a woman I met on the Internet, and I turned to my mother for advice. By this time she had distanced herself from the church, gravitating toward meditation and yoga. No, she said confidently. I know you. You’re just an escapist in a bad marriage. This sounded right, so I escaped the marriage and went on as ever, dating men whom I never loved sleeping with, sleeping with women whom I never allowed myself to love.
My physical problems persisted and I was on and off antianxiety medication until I discovered a different remedy. Marijuana started as a nighttime habit, something to do when I was watching television. Then I began experimenting with it during afternoons and even mornings, eventually becoming a very functional—if somewhat miserable—stoner.
I didn’t tell Ben about my indiscretion with the filmmaker at first. When I finally confessed, a few weeks after it happened, he was devastated, not so much by what I’d done, but that I’d lied to him about it.
So I put a lid on things even as my maladies ballooned and I became convinced I was severely physically ill. It wasn’t just my stomach. My mouth hurt, and I was experiencing a sensation of electric sparks throughout my body. I self-diagnosed—I had neuralgia! Or possibly an STD! Over the course of a year I went to several doctors, and they all told me there was nothing wrong.
Eventually, I made an offhand remark one day in therapy about feeling jealous of lesbian couples, and what I imagined their dynamic and sex to be. I chalked it up to craving “feminine energy” in my life, whatever that meant, and resumed talking about whatever else was on my mind—the week’s grievances. My therapist told me to slow down, and suggested I explore the thoughts I’d just put to her.
Ben and I stayed close to each other’s side as we finished shooting the first season of High Maintenance for HBO. But then, at the end of the summer, we tried a prolonged separation. He went to Burning Man, and I took off on a road trip across the country. I savored the silence and the space. I was beginning to understand what I needed to come to terms with. My suspicions grew at the end of the trip, when I went out to dinner with a straight, married woman I follow on Instagram. Nothing happened between us, but I felt a kind of longing, one I knew all too well. My story—the one I’d been telling myself—was becoming ridiculous.
It wasn’t the same after our separation. Ben and I realized we couldn’t carry on as we had been, and I told him I wanted to be with women. He was angry—if not altogether surprised. He struggled with the same question that everyone else asks, or wants to ask, when I tell them my story. Why did I block this out for so long? Why did I run from myself until the age of 37? I wish I had better answers. I have gay friends whom I love and admire. I’m surrounded by people with liberal values like mine. Repression is blinding, is all I can say. Self-acceptance impossibly hard. It can take a lifetime.
Last winter, shortly after coming out to my friends and family, I tapered off my antidepressants and started openly seeing women. I was on a date with another woman when I met Adele. She was our waitress, and she seemed to glow from within. When she came over to our table, she had a smoky voice and a daffy quality that reminded me of Lucille Ball. The restaurant was busy, but Adele kept drifting back, regaling us with a morbidly hilarious story about a dead neighbor. It turned out she was a writer and from New Orleans. At the end of the night, we all exchanged phone numbers.
Nearly a year later, I’m still falling for Adele. We share a fondness for eavesdropping on strangers, and we wear each other’s clothes. What we have reminds me a little bit of the beautiful little lesbian relationship I had with my friend in junior high. We would roller-skate and laugh and share clothes and have sex that we felt too guilty about ever to address. It’s a grown-up version of that, minus the shame and guilt.
I remember the good times with Ben, and I know he does too. We now live only a few blocks apart. We still share a car, an office, and a television show. There are days we spend fifteen hours in each other’s company, and mostly the time has been peaceful. Work is always where we are at our best; if we argue, it’s far less often, and we’ve improved at taking a breath first. He’s begun dating and moving on with his life. I feel lighter and healthier than I ever have.
The other day I walked into my therapist’s office, and I could sense her watching me as I took off my coat. “I feel like I just got a glimpse of you as a child,” she told me.
In this story:
Sittings Editor: Tess Herbert.
Hair: Takashi Yusa; Makeup: Allie Smith.