10.11.24
How Coming Out Changed My Relationship With My Body
TikTok creator and host of the Made It Out podcast Mal Glowenke explains the ripple effect of being true to herself.
I’ve known since I was very little that I take zero interest in boys. I always married the girls during our neighborhood play pretend wedding ceremonies, and it wasn’t until I moved to Texas in the second grade that I started to feel like that was wrong.
My gayness, an affront to the heteronormative, Christian lifestyle in the sheltered Texas suburbia I grew up in, never had a fighting chance. I couldn’t even consider what I thought my sexual identity to be before survival instinct unconsciously took over. In a culture that didn’t embrace individuality, conformity became my hard wiring.
I wondered, If who I am isn’t correct, then what is? I desperately searched outside myself to find my identity. What I discovered was the perfect storm of “traditional family values” and '90s diet culture. It became obvious to me that the person I should become was a pretty, skinny blonde who married an average man and became a mother by 25.
In hindsight it’s easy to see how I allowed my childhood bubble to influence my whole identity. It grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to turn my back on the beautiful, wide open, rainbow road I was destined to be cruising down.
Unfortunately, denying my queerness led to a cascade of self-suppression and self-destruction—and my body bore the brunt of it.
Fighting my identity
As I set out to become that perfect straight woman, actively denying who I really was created endless internal conflict. That struggle, fueled by an environment focused on diet and exercise, led to what I now understand as binge eating disorder.
Around the age of 15, I was trapped in a vicious cycle with food, desperate for something to control. I’d go to the drive through, order enough to justify my last “bad” meal, and vow to count every calorie from then on. I’d restrict myself to certain foods for weeks before breaking down. That turned into another binge and the cycle would begin again.
In an attempt to break the pattern, I turned to amphetamines and became enamored with the pills that helped me restrict. Over time, I developed a dependence that would last well into my twenties.
In my late teens and early twenties, I leaned deeper into the promise that happiness would come after I had the perfect body, a man, and a white picket fence. While I was still obsessed with becoming smaller, I started to orient my appearance to the male gaze. Studying what turned a man on or away became my obsession. I was sure that once I looked the way straight men wanted to see me, everything would be fixed. I would never have to deal with my feelings toward women or feel unsatisfied with my life.
Of course, my preoccupation with appeasing the male gaze just encouraged more dissatisfaction with my appearance. By 23, I began taking more drastic measures, ushering in my elective surgery era. One quick google search had me booking a breast augmentation.
I arrived on the day of surgery to meet the doctor for the first time (do not do this) and chose an implant size moments before going under. I went into surgery as a B cup and woke up a DDD. The perceived ease at which this changed my body and people’s view of it had me craving more. It wasn’t long before I received liposuction on almost every major area of my body and underwent a Brazilian Butt Lift.
I dressed my new body in tight dresses and high heels and chased man after man. I hoped they’d be the one to complete the misguided picture I’d attempted to paint for years.
At that time, I never considered that being a lesbian was an option. Despite the fact that I kissed girls in bars, fantasized about them, and even secretly met up with other curious women from the internet to experiment with, I still bought into the promise of heteronormativity.
Hitting my breaking point
Around the age of 25, my body began signaling a misalignment, manifesting symptoms that demanded attention no matter how long I ran from them. When I tried to ignore or silence them, they only got louder. The surgeries were catching up to me, causing numbness all over my body and complete loss of sensation in my nipples, and the pressure from my implants began to impact my breathing.
My mental health was also in decline. My relationship to food was worse than it had ever been before. And I found myself scrolling through dating apps for countless hours, matching and chatting with men for small hits of validation.
My dad has instilled in me that when something isn’t working, you need to make a change. The shift can be big or small, but the goal is “pattern interruption,” as he calls it. So, at 25, I decided it was time to pack up my entire life and move to Los Angeles on what most would call a whim.
Within weeks of being in my new city, I learned that there's something undeniably liberating about starting anew in a place where you're a complete stranger. It felt like shedding my skin, leaving the baggage of the past behind and stepping into a world of possibility. I got the sense that this was a unique opportunity to become the person I've always wanted to be.
The first thing I did upon settling in LA was add women as an option to my dating apps. I hoped to find another secret hookup, but I wound up on a seven-hour date with a lesbian. That night, I felt more seen and understood than I had my entire life. Being around someone who identified as an out lesbian made me realize that it was a real possibility for me. It was the first time I even considered it.
This is what I now refer to as my “gay panic” moment. I was shocked to realize there was no turning back. I am gay, and I always have been.
Even though this moment brought so much relief and excitement for the future it also brought the fear of leaving everything I had ever thought to be right behind. This was the beginning of an unraveling.
Making amends with my body
Being able to enjoy sex with a woman openly and freely was daunting after hiding my desires for 27 years. Surrendering to something that was labeled wrong or shameful by the heteronormative, conservative, relgious community I was raised in went against my instincts. But once I gave in, that was it.
Part of that was because sex finally made sense to me. After years of listening to women talk about it and never relating to a word, I finally understood. When I slept with a woman, I felt real pleasure for the first time. It was uninhibited and guilt-free pleasure.
That experience opened me up to a world of possibility. What else had I been denying myself based on other people's expectations and religious standards I never agreed with?
Coming out and living authentically gave me a deeper understanding of just how much I’d done to my body out of obligation and validation seeking. I was so caught up in pleasing others and attempting to meet their criteria, I never felt the agency to say no to them or yes to myself. Instead of giving my body what it wanted or needed, I chased an idealized, hetero version of me that made everyone else happy.
That self-sacrifice made it easy for my disordered eating to take over. It also made impulsively altering my body with surgical procedures a no-brainer. Conformity trumped authenticity at every turn.
But, ultimately, embracing my sexuality was the catalyst to radically accepting every part of myself. It quieted the noise telling me to change, making it easier to hear my own desires. That gave me the clarity to finally address my disordered eating and find internal sources of self-worth.
I started by mourning how I’d treated my body up to this point. I sat with my anger, sorrow, and regret and gained a deeper understanding of what parts of myself were truly important to me. Turns out, being pretty, blonde, and skinny weren’t actually at the top of my list.
Letting go of those standards helped loosen my need for control over what I ate. Before I came out, I thought having the perfect body (and a man and suburban Texas life) would lead to happiness. But when I let that idea go, my mindset shifted. I didn’t feel compelled to punish my body in the pursuit of an ideal I no longer subscribed to. While it wasn’t an instant fix for my disordered eating, it kicked off a healing process that eventually led me to talk to my therapist about my relationship with food and my body.
I also underwent explant surgery two years after coming out. It became obvious that the alterations I made to my body were the last piece of my straight identity I needed to shed to fully move on. Afterward, a literal and figurative weight was lifted off of my chest.
Coming out has been the single most profound thing I have ever experienced. It has helped me restore my relationship to myself, teaching me to rely on my inner knowing and forgive my missteps. Overall, being true to myself has forced me out of deep neglect and disconnection into a life centered on self-love.
But queer people aren’t the only ones who can come back home to themselves. I encourage anyone to think about what aspects of yourself you’ve been denying or neglecting. When you’re ready, lean into the parts you’ve been trying to hide from. Own them, embrace them in broad daylight, shout them from the rooftops. Find your own rainbow road and take the next exit onto it.
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