Last month, at the start of my coaching session, I very surprisingly and unexpectedly started to cry as we sat in silence across from each other for a few minutes of sitting practice.

This sitting practice at the start of our sessions is powerful, because it is a coming together and a settling down in which all my crazy thoughts and hopes and aspirations take shape into something calm and constructed.

I cried because the dilemma which I have tried to manage for many years feels like it is finally resolving itself in my mind to a different outcome from the one I had hoped to achieve.

I was overwhelmed with  sadness for the sense of failure which surfaced in my emotional state through my tears.

The beautiful quiet period of time inter-dispersed with my audible and uncontrollable  sobs as my coach professionally looked on, was indeed a cathartic moment.

The release of emotion was exactly what I needed, but until that moment I had not been able to express it.

I cried, but it did not take away the anguish, it wasn’t meant to, instead it lead me to a kind of deep awakening to accept things as they are, rather than how I would like them to be.

I am gay, and despite the deepest protestations in the deepest part of my soul to the reality of this fact, I cannot continue to live a life half-lived unless by some other means I can find a way to be married and gay.

I am already married and gay, so what I mean is, I need my wife to either fully accept the full meaning of my reality, or to reject it, which would be entirely reasonable of her so to do.

I cried, and the physical release of tears and unstoppable shaking of my head and chest in the great upheaval of the storm in that place of peace, was a manifestation of all that has gone before me, and all that is now, and of all that is still to come.

I cried, and the mental effort to hold on to the purpose of it all, so that I could explain it to myself, and then to my coach, was a journey of discovery and of clarity and truth.

I so want to be able to fit into all the spaces that I occupy in my life as a husband and as father, but somehow my tears confirmed that this space I occupy may have to change, or rather, my relationship to the space I occupy, may have to become more honest  if I am to live more in step with my truth.

At the end of the silence, my coach looks at me and says “So, why are you crying?”

My voice is broken and I make her a reply, “I am crying because I am grieving for a life which I can no longer sustain”

My next blog will be: The Solitary Tree On The Horizon

William Defoe