Something big happened in 2020. I know what you’re thinking…
I came out.
(Oh, that wasn’t it? Well, then add that to the other thing.)
In March 2020, I found myself on the cusp of coming out, upending my entire life and identity as a Betty Crocker Stepford wife who had married my college boyfriend. March seemed like it would be safe, serenely bypassing every holiday that might be ruined by my surprise queerness.
I spent most of 2020 not only inside, but inside with a man who increasingly knew nothing about me. I myself had only just started to listen to the endless screaming within, the siren wail that would whoosh forward whenever I saw women in love. It leaked out of me from every seam, this longing for a life unlived. It grew from the inside out, affecting my fashion and my writing and my taste. I spent my time alone digging caves deeper and deeper inside, discovering my animal.
It was fitting that the world stopped right as my self-discovery had begun. What is often a raucous rite of passage—full of regrettably late nights and dizzying joy—became a solitary spelunking. I wasn’t kissing girls at New York’s Cubbyhole at 3am, but I was sitting with myself in profoundly deep repose. Eighteen months later, I was a woman on fire.
That’s when I got a recurring role in Three Women—a series based on the nonfiction best-seller by Lisa Taddeo.
I’d be one of the study subjects discovering her sexuality within the safety of Shailene Woodley’s sociological biodome. There, we will meet Betty Gilpin’s character, Lina—a woman atrophying inside herself, suffering from myriad somatic issues as she forces herself to shrink into a marriage that is too small for her.
I was fully shaken when I discovered this story. As someone who had bent herself into fragile origami to cover the broken and secret parts of herself, I had experienced several years of life-stopping back spasms, hives, a whole sideshow of reproductive woes, and the nuisance of IBS scored throughout. My life ground to a halt before I came out, unable to stay "straight" in the world with this burden on my shoulders. I knew Lina; I knew what desperation would drive a woman to join a group like this, because it was the same desperation that drove me out of the closet and plummeting out of the life I had built for nearly twenty years.
Right after I auditioned for Three Women, I left my life as I knew it. I separated and followed the woman I loved to the Midwest, and everything I knew collapsed in on itself in quick succession. I lost two family members, my home, and everything I thought I knew about my life. I found myself homeless and queer in a place I’d never been, with nowhere to return to. When the phone rang, it was my agent, with the first job I’d booked since quarantine.
Being on set with this collective of women, watching this story unfold as the cameras rolled, I could feel the echoes of my own experiences. Being that it was a book written by a woman about women’s stories, showrun and filmed and directed by women, we were in a unique incubator to share more of ourselves on camera than expected, and to more profoundly, to share more of ourselves with each other. The fictional, on-screen support group manifested into real life. We actresses—reeling from the pandemic, grappling with coming out and grief and loss and divorce and pregnancy and menopause and change—held sacred space for and with each other, both as the cameras rolled and long after they cut.
Women feel alone in these experiences because they are not talked about; they feel alien and wrong and broken, lost in a labyrinth of expectations that were never designed by women to begin with. Once we start that group, write that book, make that show—the second we come together in community is the second we begin to heal. Doing this show wrenched me open, challenging me to be at my most true and vulnerable, sparking deep conversations that followed with my therapist, my girlfriends, and my mother.
Things have blessedly calmed for me since we were last together. I found my way back to the east coast, the woman I love leading the way. I gulped down sweet ocean air after holding my breath for years.
I am a foreigner to anyone who knew me as Wife, but I am more myself than I have been in a very, very long time.
I am so grateful to look back on that chasm of time, an era when everything was lost, and to be part of this precious, deeply important story of hunger and want and devastation.
THREE WOMEN premieres on Starz this Friday, September 13th, streaming immediately through the app and broadcast at 10pm.
xx Jen
Wowowow 🤩🎉👏