So: this is going to be long and it’ll talk about like nine people. I’m sorry for that, but there's a lot of relevant history to cover.

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Growing up, I lived alone with my mom pretty far away from civilization and didn't have much contact with the outside world. Around the age of 10 or so, I started having phone calls with a group of four other kids the same age in similar situations.

We became fast friends, and for the next six years, they were just about my only sources of social contact. Janice was sweet, smart, kind, and loved to bake. Chad was a wall of impenetrable cool with a very-well-hidden warm heart, and I macked hard on him for quite a while, but he was gay as all hell so that was never going to happen. Roy was very clueless but endearing, and we all had crushes on him at some point. Musette was a shy and endearing ray of sunshine who always kept up an optimistic outlook even while being tormented by her garbage brother.

My mom died when I was 16. Shortly before she did, she told me I had a twin sister, Violet, who lived in the city with our dad. When my mom passed, I had nowhere else to go, so I tried to seek her out. She’d had no idea I existed either and was keen to meet me. For some reason, we agreed to meet at a summer camp to spend some time together, and I invited my four friends to come as well. They did, and that summer was wonderful. I had human contact for the first time with my four best friends and the sister I’d always dreamed of.

Janice brought her stepbrother Eric to camp with her, and we quickly hit it off. He was sweet, carefree, inspirational without meaning to be, and dorky in the most adorable way. We went on some great adventures there, just the two of us, and I felt we really had a connection.

It was awesome while it lasted, but after camp ended, everybody just sort of… drifted apart. Eric texted me occasionally, but he started spending longer and longer just wrapped up in his home. I saw my friends sometimes, but as we grew up, we all called each other less often.

I lived with Violet for the next two years. At age 18, I went to the same university as Janice and Musette, who were both as sweet as ever, and hung out with them a bunch. Musette and I eventually got a house together. Violet, meanwhile, moved in with her longtime girlfriend; even though gay marriage wasn’t legal yet, they held a ceremony and started calling each other wives. Chad and Roy dated for a while, but it didn’t work out.

During this general time period, I started exploring a lot of complicated thoughts on sexuality and gender and being a person in general. Growing up away from society, I never really had a good framework of what it meant to ‘be a woman’, and for a while I didn’t know if people wanted to think of me as such. I thought about what it would mean to date a possibly-aromantic girl like Musette. We never actually called ourselves girlfriends (neither one of us was big on labels), but our relationship was definitely closer than most friends. I dunno how well I can describe it.

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When we were 23, Eric started going outside and got an actual job rather than living off of his (admittedly luxurious) inheritance. We got to know each other again, and after a while it felt like the last seven years of distance had never happened.

Eric and I started dating, and it was wonderful. He was still the same dorky and lovable kid from summer camp, just taller and beefier. The only hiccups were that he was a little awkward around Musette (he and I never really discussed my relationship with her), and doubly awkward when the subject of religion came up (I was Mormon at the time, and he’s an atheist). But I could make him feel happy, and seeing him smile made me smile. He seemed on edge a lot, like he could never tell what I was thinking, but I knew that he was head over heels for me. It was an idyllic time.

Janice and Roy started dating, too, and Janice got pregnant at the same time. Years later, I would learn that their relationship started when they slept together while he was very drunk, and he stuck around afterwards out of a feeling of obligation to her and the child so conceived.

I didn’t talk to Chad as much anymore, but he usually seemed pretty relaxed, so I couldn’t tell that anything was wrong.

Then he killed himself.

No warning, no explanation, not even a goddamn note. Just one of my only four friends growing up… poof, just like that. Gone.

I still don’t know why he did it. I doubt any of us will ever know.

It was harrowing, to say the least. But it got me thinking… about mortality, and fate, and how there's no time for doubt. So I shelved all my gender thoughts and uncertainty about my own identity, and proposed to Eric just two months into our relationship.

We got married soon after and had a kid. He was pretty enthusiastic about naming him Charlie, after his father, so I rolled with it. Later Eric told me he was offput by the fact that I didn’t have any suggestions of my own.

Janice and Roy got married, too, and also had a kid, whom they named Bill after one of Roy’s army buddies. Janice threw herself into local politics around the same time, and Musette and I helped campaign for her, because that was what good friends do, right?

Eric and I had a perfect life on the surface, but we were so focused on being young and in love that we didn’t really talk about our feelings much… which I regret.

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Fast-forward five years, and it was clear the stress of politics had really gotten to Janice’s head. She started treating Roy more like a chew toy than a husband. There were one or two times that I heard her yell at him about his lack of proficiency in bed while in earshot of their son and houseguests. He would just lie down and take whatever she dished out. She never seemed to care about her son, and everyone knew she was having an affair with one of her campaign advisers.

As she moved up the ranks in politics, she started adopting anti-gay rhetoric, which caused my sister Violet and her wife to stop speaking to her. Musette and I stuck by her, because we thought politics should never come between friends. I know what you’re thinking, I couldn’t see what she was becoming… but none of this happened at once, so it only seems clearly awful in retrospect. We’d been best friends for decades, and she was always so sweet as a kid; surely this phase of hers would pass, right?

Eric and I still played the part of the happily married ideal couple, but too often he seemed… distant, somehow. He’d zone out, lost in melancholy, but would snap back with a big smile on his face and would deny that anything was wrong. I worried about him, and worried that I wasn’t doing enough to make this relationship work, but ultimately I felt like he’d tell me about whatever was going on when he was ready. Things felt tense, and I felt like our marriage was fragile, brittle, like I could look away for a moment and come back to find it broken.

That breaking point came on our son Charlie’s fifth birthday.

I was surprised when Eric wanted to have the party at Janice and Roy’s house, since he seemed uncomfortable with everything Janice was doing, but I didn’t argue. About an hour in, he asked Janice’s son Bill to show him something elsewhere in the house.

It turned out he had a spectacularly ill-thought-out plan to whisk Bill away from his terrible home life to come live with us. Bill desperately wanted to go, but this was still kidnapping, and there was no way Janice would be okay with it! She caught them in the act of absconding and demanded Eric explain himself.

For the first time since I’d met him, Eric snapped. He let the past however-many years of pent-up frustration out at once. He accused his stepsister of raping Roy and treating him like shit, neglecting her son, sleeping with a staffer, persecuting my sister, and a host of other crimes. She had a barbed comeback for each one, saying that he had no place judging her relationships or who she let into her bed. He got angrier and angrier as the argument wore on, and if it had continued much longer, I honestly think he would have assaulted Janice.

But when Charlie and Bill started crying from fear, he struggled to calm himself down quickly. He tried to apologize; Janice snapped that no one wanted to hear it. She was right about that, at least. I couldn’t face him.

At that point, he just left. He ran out of Janice’s house and only showed up back at our house the next day.

We never talked about this incident again. I felt uncomfortable bringing it up, and he certainly didn’t want to.

We stayed married, but the facade of perfection had shattered. He was always depressed and angry, unwilling to talk, nothing at all like the cheery and adventurous boy he used to be. I began to dread coming home every evening.

Working for Janice alongside Musette, escaping from my horribly depressing husband, was the only place I felt remotely happy, and I think that’s why I turned a blind eye to her faults for so long. I kept supporting her even as she grew ever more influential and corrupt, because I knew my best friend had a good head on her shoulders and would be a good leader. I suppose I wanted to prove that I was normal, stable, good at sticking with friends.

After five long, miserable years, I finally accepted that things weren’t going to get better. I filed for divorce and got full custody of Charlie, and Eric didn’t complain.

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Last year-- five years after I got divorced-- I sort of slowly distanced myself from Janice. I wish I could say that there was some big epiphany that opened my eyes, but no, it was a gradual thing. I didn’t think Janice was flat-out evil like Eric did, but she'd definitely fallen a long way from the girl I knew, and eventually I realized that being with her was making me miss out on a lot of other stuff. Violet, for instance, hadn’t spoken to me in years, and she wasn’t the only one.

In June of last year, Roy snuck out in the middle of the night with Bill and showed up on Eric’s doorstep. They needed a place to stay and had nowhere else to go, so Eric took them in. Janice didn’t even bother trying to see Roy, she just mailed him some divorce papers.

Roy convinced Eric to come see me and try to patch things up. So we set up a meeting at my house, which used to be our house, and had an honest-to-god conversation for the first time in forever.

He started off by apologizing, unprompted, for screwing up my entire life. He’d gotten it into his head that everyone’s current miserable state of affairs was because of the influence of his desires for everyone to be a certain way, and he should have stayed out of everyone’s lives and just gone away. I’m not sure how, but he’d talked himself into believing he was responsible for Chad’s suicide and Janice and Roy’s terrible relationship, as well as the state of my life which he knew was miserable.

I told him he was full of crap, which really startled him. My life is far from perfect, but I like it, and he doesn’t get to tell me it’s screwed up or take the blame for that. It’s my life, I own it, and sure I’ve made my share of mistakes, but my life is mine.

After staring at me, stunned, for a few seconds, Eric broke into a wide grin. He told me that something had always seemed uncanny to him about our relationship, like I was so headstrong and confident when we were young, but really passive and just willing to do whatever he wanted when we were married. I pointed out that I was standing up for myself just like the “influence of his desires” wanted me to, only I didn’t need his help to get better at doing that. It seemed like this was the first time he’d been told he wasn’t the protagonist of everyone’s story, and he took a few minutes adjusting to that liberation.

Since he’d finally explained what was going on inside his head for the first time, I figured the least I could do was do the same. I told him about my struggles with gender identity, how I had overcompensated by throwing myself headfirst into our relationship, how I had stopped caring about gender once I got pregnant with Charlie, and how even now I wasn’t sure whether “female” was the best descriptor for me. I told him how I had wanted to make him happy, then slowly realized that that wasn’t my job, even though much of me still wanted to.

We talked for about an hour, and started laughing and crying with real warmth as we tore off relationship-issue band-aids left and right. We talked about how even though we’ve still got a lot to work through, we’re not dead yet, and still have time to figure things out and mess up even more stuff, which he thought was pretty damn inspirational.

After our conversation, Charlie came home from school, and his dad took him out for a drive.

It would be the first of many. Eric’s and my conversations would be, too.

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Roy and Bill have been living with Eric for the past year, and while things aren’t perfect, they’re happier than they’ve been in years. When Roy isn’t being cowed into submission by an abusive wife, he can be infectiously positive and exuberant. And despite everything, Bill’s grown into a sweet and charming young man.

I think it’s been really good for Eric, too, having somebody to cheer him up and prevent him from stewing in his own bullshit. He’s also been prescribed antidepressants, which I can only assume helps too. I’ve been seeing him a fair deal lately. He smiles often, and that twinkle in his eye which I once loved so much has returned. He has good days and bad days, like everyone else, but I think he’s happy just living his life.

When we were married, I felt like I couldn’t talk to him. Now I feel like I could tell him anything. And I know I could ask him anything, and he’d tell me. I’ve talked with our son, and he feels the same way toward his father.

Lately, I’ve been feeling some familiar feelings… and I’ve been wondering. I know that neither of us will ever be done screwing up or figuring out who we are, but now that we’re somewhat stable and can actually talk to each other… could we begin again, together? Could we be happy as a couple, even with everything that’s happened in our past? I don’t want to go back to where I’d been with him, but having been there with him, together, feels like enough. And maybe something better could be built on this new foundation.

But I still haven’t had the courage to reach out to Violet. I know I did her dirty; for all my talk about how politics shouldn’t come between friends, Janice’s politics were a direct threat to Violet and her wife, and I didn’t stand up for my sister.

I’ve heard through a mutual friend that Violet is thinking of running against Janice. If she did, and I lent her my support, it could be a big help.

Would she forgive me? Would she even want to talk to me?

I need some help deciding if I should try to restart relationships with these two people close to my heart, or if I should just be friends with Eric and let Violet live her life without me.

TL;DR: My marriage failed due to an inability to communicate and lack of assertiveness, and my gay sister stopped talking to me because I supported my homophobic best friend. Now that my ex-husband and I have started talking and I’ve distanced myself from my former best friend, I’m considering reaching out to my sister and starting a new relationship with my ex.