I spent a year in the mouth of a whale. Not literally, of course, but in a place just as dark and confining. Inside, the outside world became a muffled hum, and time lost its meaning. It was a space of suspended existence—quiet, briny, and claustrophobic—where I felt both strangely protected, and painfully trapped.

In that cavernous darkness, I was living in a state of emotional and existential suspension. The whale had swallowed me whole on the day I realized that those I loved most had betrayed me. Perhaps it wasn’t the belly of the beast—maybe I wasn’t fully lost—but it was the mouth: a limbo where I was neither free nor consumed. Grief and shock held me in their jaws, and I floated there for what felt like an eternity, afraid to move in any direction.

The grief that swallowed me was born of an unexpected betrayal. One wound in particular cut me deeper than all the others: the sudden and unexpected loss of a childhood friend, my best friend of nearly thirty years. She was, in many ways, a sister to me—we grew up side by side, whispering secrets under starry summer skies, trading dreams about who we’d become. If anyone in the world truly knew me, it was her. Or so I believed.

That illusion shattered the day I introduced her to Amelia. Amelia is my partner, my wife, the woman not only who holds my heart, but is the center of my universe. I had imagined my best friend would embrace Amelia just as I did—warmly, without question—because that’s what you do when someone you love finds happiness.

Instead, I watched an icy distance cloud my friend’s face the moment she realized that Amelia is transgender. Her polite smile tightened at the edges; her eyes darted away. Later, in a hushed and stilted voice, she confessed that this—my life, my marriage—was something she couldn’t accept. In that moment, I felt a cold weight of understanding: the person I had trusted with every chapter of my life was not the person I thought she was.

I left that conversation as if in a daze, my stomach hollowed out. This was someone who had seen me through every awkward year, every heartbreak and triumph since we were girls. She had cried with me when we were working on an ambulance together, cheered for me when I returned with my certifications from the fire academy, and shared countless ordinary afternoons that became cherished memories. Yet when it truly mattered, when I needed her to see me, and the woman I love, she refused. It was as if decades of friendship evaporated in an instant, erased by a truth I had thought she could handle. I realized, standing there with my hands shaking and my eyes burning with tears I refused to shed in front of her, that perhaps she had never really known me at all.

Hers was not the only betrayal. Other childhood friends began to drift away in the wake of my coming out into the fullness of my life. Some stopped calling, their silence heavy with unspoken judgment. Others stayed in my orbit but at a careful distance, offering polite small talk that never touched the changes in my life—never asking about Amelia, or acknowledging the woman I had become.

Each quiet dismissal, each awkward omission, was another stone in my pocket pulling me deeper into sorrow. The people I once called my chosen family had become strangers, revealing prejudices I never imagined they harbored. It was a slow exodus of trust: one friend moving out of reach, then another, until I found myself virtually alone with my truth.

I didn’t fight these losses—at least not outwardly. Instead, I went silent. I retreated into myself, carrying on with the motions of everyday life while a storm raged quietly inside. By all appearances I was surviving: I kept writing, kept taking pictures, kept up with chores here at my Vermont farm. But inside the whale’s mouth, I was drowning in unshed tears.

Night after night, I’d lie in bed, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat echoing in that darkness, wondering how it was possible to feel so lonely with so much love in my own house. I couldn’t bear to burden Amelia with the depth of my hurt—after all, she was the one directly snubbed by people I had sworn were good. So I carried it in silence. Each day I swallowed a little more of my pain, until carrying that weight became as routine as breathing.

Surviving betrayal takes a silent toll. There were no dramatic confrontations after that, no screaming matches or public reckonings. Only the slow, steady drip of heartbreak, hollowing me out from the inside.

I found myself avoiding the topics that mattered most. When old acquaintances from back home would ask how things were, I’d force a smile and say fine. I did not mention Amelia’s name, fearing the cold pause or forced nicety that might follow. I learned which parts of myself to keep hidden in conversations, like tucking away a precious photograph whenever certain company came by. In trying not to make others uncomfortable, I contorted myself into a smaller shape. And with every compromise, every quiet omission, I felt another piece of me sealing off, growing numb in the dark.

It’s a terrible thing to live unseen, especially by those who once claimed to love you. In that whale’s mouth, in that self-imposed darkness, I felt invisible even to myself at times. I spent long hours with my own thoughts as my only company. I replayed old memories, searching for clues—were the signs there all along? Did I miss some hint of who my friends really were, or did they change when I wasn’t looking? I sifted through years of laughter, tears, and late-night talks, now all tainted by doubt. In the endless night of that metaphorical belly, I questioned my own judgment, my own worth. What was so wrong with me or my life that it made lifelong friends turn away? The question echoed in the darkness, unanswered.

At some point—after months that bled into years—I grew tired of the question. Tired of making myself small. Tired of the taste of saltwater sorrow in my throat every time I stayed silent to keep the peace.

Maybe it was the strength I saw in Amelia’s eyes each time she assured me we would be okay. Maybe it was simply exhaustion from carrying the weight of others’ prejudice. But I began to stir inside that whale. I began to push back.

Naming a truth, I found, has power. The first time I finally said it aloud, it was late on a winter night. The woodstove was crackling, the world outside as still as a held breath, and Amelia sat across from me at our kitchen table, worry in her gaze.

My voice shook with anger and relief as I whispered the words: “I am hurt. I am furious at them. They betrayed me.” Saying it felt like striking flint in a dark cave—sparks flew, illuminating jagged walls I had refused to see. I let the words hang in the air, and in that moment I swear I felt the great jaws of the whale begin to loosen their grip.

Awakening to betrayal is a painful rebirth. I wish I could say that as soon as I acknowledged the hurt, I was instantly free of it. Life isn’t so tidy.

The truth didn’t set me free in a burst of light or spit me onto a sunny shore fully healed. What it did was give me clarity. It allowed me to see the situation for what it was: I had been living in a purgatory of unspoken pain, trying to spare the feelings of people who had not spared mine. Recognizing that was like finally breaching the surface after holding my breath too long—my lungs burned, my eyes stung with tears, but I could see the sky again. I could see the truth.

And the truth was this: my womanhood, my queerness, my very self—these are not tragedies. The real tragedy was that I ever thought I owed anyone an explanation, or an apology for them. I am a woman who fought to be herself in a world that tried to tell me who to be. I am a queer woman who found a love that feels like sunlight, a love that didn’t ask for permission, nor forgiveness.

There is nothing shameful in that. If my old friends could not embrace the full, authentic me, then their love was always conditional. That realization hurt, but it also set something inside me straight.

From that hard truth, I began to salvage hard-won wisdom. I learned that being a woman, in all my strength and vulnerability, means I get to define myself—I won’t let anyone, not even lifelong friends, define me by their fear or ignorance. I learned that being queer is a gift of seeing the world with more compassion, not a flaw to hide. And I learned that real friends, real family, do not require you to cut out pieces of yourself to make them comfortable. Love doesn’t demand that kind of sacrifice; fear does.

The most difficult lesson was one of self-acceptance. In the absence of those once-beloved voices, I had to become my own friend. I sat with my pain and did not look away. I let myself feel the betrayal in its entirety—the anger, the sadness, the disappointment—like letting a storm rage through. And when the storm finally passed, I found, amid the debris, a quiet resolve.

I realized I was still here. Still me. Bruised, yes, but intact. In the whale’s mouth I had felt hollow, but once I allowed the echoing pain to crescendo and fade, I discovered an echo of something else: my own resilience.

There is no tidy closure to this story of lost friendships. I have not been granted any neat happy endings or apologies that magically stitch up the wounds. The friends I lost may never understand the hurt they caused, and I have made an uneasy peace with that.

Instead, I am learning to live with the duality of ache and clarity. The ache is the part of me that still mourns what I thought I had—the sisterhood, the unconditional camaraderie of youth—now forever changed. The clarity is the light that finally shines on all those shadows, revealing things as they truly are.

Standing here now, I feel both of those things at once. The sadness of betrayal sits heavy in my chest, but beside it, a glowing truth burns steady: I know who I am, and I know what I’ve survived. I stepped out of that whale’s mouth not into blissful closure, but into a world made honest by my own acknowledgment.

I carry the knowledge that I was betrayed and that I lived through it. I carry the knowledge that my love is real and my identity is valid, even if people I cherished refused to see it. These truths are my compass as I move forward.

In the end, perhaps survival itself is a kind of grace. I was swallowed by despair, but I was not consumed by it. I emerged with scars and a clearer vision of the world, of who my true friends are, and of who I am without the lies I told myself. There’s no neat ending waiting for me—just the ongoing journey of a woman claiming her own life, day by day.

The mouth of the whale is now just a metaphor, a place I dwelled in for a time. It taught me what I needed to know, but I don’t live there anymore.