I was 35. I didn’t marry too young or commit because of extenuating circumstances. I took my time, chose well. And was the best gay I could be along the way — out, proud and social-justice minded with an aggressively queer haircut. I fought for our space and our rights alongside so many others, and in the end, none of that kept my marriage together.

Somehow, the only part of my Catholic upbringing that seems to have survived my youth is the feeling that divorce is wrong, preventable and my fault. So I’ve wondered: Should I have been gayer? Waited longer? Chosen not to date so I wouldn’t have to feel this pain? Married everyone I dated so this wouldn’t be such a shock?

Humiliating as this is for me to admit as an artist, I grew up in a seriously stable home. My parents have been together for 50 years, are best friends and share one pair of gardening clogs. I have no frame of reference for dissolution except for what I’ve seen in movies. And there isn’t a Beyoncé song about being two independent adults who shared a friend group, a business interest and a button-down shirt collection but can’t make it work. Do you know how scary it is to exist beyond the edge of the Beyoncé catalog? Terrifying.

A lot of that terror comes from fear that I wasted the moment in which I get to live. My adulthood lined up with the fastest civil rights movement in history, one that applies to me directly. I expected strides in my personal life to match our strides in freedom. I expected to perfectly navigate marriage like some sort of lesbian phoenix that never stops rising. Then I remembered the phoenix combusts again and again. Maybe the Icarus story is more appropriate. All I know is my wings broke, I’m tired and my life isn’t what I thought it would be.

For the first time, I am down for the count. I took the initial rejection of my queerness by family, friends and my faith and used it to become famously gay. My past is rife with moments when I got cut from the swim team and the next year made captain, or, more seriously, wrote an hour of material about my sexual assault to raise money for rape crisis intervention. My life has been typified by my obsession with being a survivor, the comeback kid.

But this year has been a full stop. I miss the person I trusted with my squishy, small, inner self. And I miss the safety that came with being an example of queerness done right in our outside-the-home life. I can’t sleep. When I do, I relive the loss in my dreams. In my waking, I drag myself from place to place, unable to force a purpose or a lesson or a next chapter.