In honour of National Coming Out Day on October 11, we're sharing two stories about queer journeys, self-discovery, and what it means to finally become your authentic self.

Part 1: Every time Billie Sainwood is intimate with a partner, she loses consciousness—a medical mystery that makes dating difficult.

Billie Sainwood is a poet, performer, and trans menace living in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Had Magazine, the Atlanta Fringe Festival, and she was recently one of Bloodletter Magazine's 2025 Trans Voices in Horror. Her poetry collections WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN and 36 VIEWS OF MY BREASTS are available from Kith Books.

Part 2: Kelsea Best is sleepwalking through graduate school until an unexpected encounter with a postdoc at a brewery forces her to confront feelings she's spent a lifetime trying to ignore.

Kelsea Best is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University where she researches topics related to climate justice and equitable climate adaptation. She is a native of Nashville, TN and has been in Columbus for almost three years. She lives with her spouse, Ash, dog, Henry, and cat, Dany. When she isn't teaching and conducting research, Kelsea enjoys horseback riding, exercising, gardening, and reading everything from murder mysteries to fairy romance novels. She is a proud queer woman and nature lover.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Maybe it was growing up trans or maybe it was growing up fat, but I've always felt, ever since I was little, more aware that I occupy a physical body and more aware than other people. Certainly more aware than other kids in school. I would watch them unselfconsciously dance during school dances or run freely during recess, and I wanted none of that. I was far too interested in the quandary of owning a thing and being responsible for a thing that I also am and have. Deeply confusing.

And I have so little control over it. Why do I shiver when I'm cold? Why does my stomach make noise when I'm hungry? Why do I sweat when I'm hot? Why do I yawn when I'm tired or bored in math class? I don't have any control over that.

And I'm freaking out all the time. I don't have time to learn how to play basketball. I'm sorry. That's still true, by the way. We should all be freaking out about that all the time. You have a thing that you also are that you cannot control.

Billie Sainwood shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA on March 19, 2026. Photo by Rob Felt.

You're going to drive home and think about that, and you're going to crash your car. I'm sorry. And this is no more apparent to me than during sleep.

Oh, sure. We know that this flesh circus is running all the time. And still, we decide to send the managers home for the night and let it run itself? No, thank you. Oh, sure. I just unselfconsciously exist in this form and I'm not in control of it.

And still, we make the decision sometimes to sleep with other people. “Hey, I'm going to be the least in control I've ever been. There are chances that I may snore, talk in my sleep, drool, thrash around like I'm fighting a shark. You're just going to have to deal with that and love me anyway?” No, thank you.

Naturally, with this outlook on life, I am cursed with a certain Dante-esque contrapasso where, now, I have even less control over when I sleep than you do. I fall asleep often, right before, right after, or occasionally during sex. A lot. I have literally, literally, listen to me Atlanta, I have literally been in someone's mouth, leaned back to enjoy myself, and then woke up an indeterminate amount of time later with them holding me like a microphone at a post‑game press conference with their head cocked to one side going, “Uh, you okay?”

No. No, I'm not okay. I'm a circus freak who falls asleep during sex. I'm not feeling great about it, and what do I say? They're going to think they're boring, or that I'm not having a good time, or they killed me. And I have to deal with that. The only effective way that I have to deal with that is to just carpet bomb the room with apologies.

“I'm so sorry. I know it's awkward. I didn't mean to make you feel awkward. Bodies can't control the thing that I am and have. I'm sorry. I can't learn how to play basketball. It's a whole thing. I'm sorry I'm like this. If we don't see each other again, I get it. I'm sorry I'm like this.”

So dating is hard. But I still manage to get dates. I don't know why. And this is how I meet Laika. Laika is my long‑distance girlfriend. She lives in Vermont. And after months of texting each other and calling each other and planning, finally she comes to visit me in Atlanta. It is our first time in person with one another.

And things are going well. So well, in fact, that we're in bed. So well, in fact, that I lean back, relax, and wake up an indeterminate amount of time later with her staring at me like I'm a science fair project. Just, “That's interesting.”

And again, carpet bomb. “I'm sorry. This is awkward. It's a lot. I should have told you before. If you don't want to come see me again, I get it. Do you want an earlier flight home? I don't have time to learn basketball. I'm sorry.”

And she goes, “Oh, you have cataplexy. My ex had that.” And then she goes to the bathroom to wash her hands and I'm laying in bed like, “What's cataplexy?”

And she's in there humming to herself like nothing has happened, and I'm having a revelation. So I'm Googling cataplexy.

Turns out, there's a rare form of narcolepsy where you can reach a state of emotional excitement and lose consciousness. Apparently, there's a subcategory of that for sex.

And I now realize that it's one of two things. Either I have the incredibly sexy orgasmolepsy, where, during sex, I lose so much muscle tone that I enter a kind of sleep paralysis, where I'm catatonic, aware, but unable to move, which sounds close, but not quite. Or I have vasovagal syncope, or VS, where my vagus nerve just short circuits during sex and I immediately fall asleep.

Unfortunately, that one sounds more accurate. And I'm, again, in bed learning all this. I don't know what's taking her so long.

But suddenly it has a name. And suddenly, it has this identity to it, and it's a thing that I now have and am. Surprisingly, I feel control. Information is power. I have power now. And with this power comes a wave of gender euphoria. Sex, romance, is so enormous that I faint because of it.

I'm a Bridgerton character. I'm a Jane Austen protagonist. Romance makes me swoon. What's more woman than that?

And suddenly I'm wondering, how do I factor this into my life? Do I buy a bunch of petticoats? Do I keep a bottle of smelling salts by the bed? Like Laudanum in a Western? Is that just how I am now? I am a woman out of time and part of a literary tradition. It's so exciting.

And of course, of course it's Laika who tells me this. Laika, in cut‑off jeans and Doc Martens with a whole host of medical knowledge for some reason. And that's just one more dot in the array of my life where queer people have told me about myself.

I first decided to transition when I saw other trans people on Twitter not dying or being fabulously wealthy. Whenever I have a question, still, to this day, my endocrinologist will tell me to ask my friends about my hormones, see what works in my body. There's no manual, no resource, no textbook we don't learn for ourselves. It's like I have access to the special website that none of you straights get to have. I get to have queer MD, and I just get to learn about myself through the experience of other people.

And more than the relief of now knowing that this thing that's wrong with me, this circus freak part of me isn't true, it's that I get to feel known. I get to feel seen. Someone she loved had this thing that I have, and she loves me.

And also, I get to fall asleep in someone's mouth and wake up there too, because we've talked about it. Because now, it's a kink thing and that rules for everyone. That's a hell of a glass of lemonade. You know what I mean?

Now, I just realize that I get to share this part of myself without shame because I feel loved and supported. And I hope everyone here gets to experience that because it's just so much. It's so enormous. I just, I need someone to pinch me because I'm falling asleep. Or, more importantly, I'm falling in love.

Thank you.

Part 2

When I was little, I used to love wandering through my backyard in Tennessee. I would usually be wearing shorts and a t‑shirt, probably one or two skinned knees, and I would collect berries, rocks, little pieces of grass and leaves, and make up stories about their magical properties. Then I would take all those things and combine them into powerful potions.

I could literally spend hours like this, alone, just happy to be out in nature and comfortable with my own company. In hindsight, I was a weird little kid. I was also homeschooled, and I remember growing up just this sense of freedom, like the world was there to explore and I was a small but important part of it.

In seventh grade, I went to real school for the first time. This was a fancy all‑girls private school in the South, so plaid skirts and polos. Many of these girls had known each other since kindergarten. A lot of them and their families went to the same church. Many of them went to something called cotillion, which I learned is essentially charm school for how to be a perfect southern belle. I hadn't even heard of cotillion and I didn't go to church, so I felt like an unsophisticated little heathen.

Kelsea Best shares her story at Wild Goose Creative in Columbus, OH in March 2026. Photo by Jessica Miller.

For the first time in this new environment, I felt pressure to conform. I felt pressure to act a certain way, to look a certain way, and above all else, to be good.

But I've always been a quick learner, so I adapted quickly. I put on my loafers every day. I learned the school alma mater, and I learned how to start to hide away the parts of myself that didn't quite fit in.

And despite feeling socially awkward sometimes, I did really love that school. Some of the teachers were amazing, and they fostered my sense of curiosity. I started to learn about a new way to see and understand the world around me, which was science. So instead of a witch of the woods, I decided I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

Of course scientists, we all know, are objective. They're rational, unfeeling, and analytical. You know, like Bones in the hit TV show Bones? Or House in the hit TV show House? I loved both of those shows as a kid. So this was great. As an aspiring scientist, I could have relationships, but they couldn't get in the way of the pursuit of science. The most important thing was accurate data and being analytical.

At school, I was praised for being so level‑headed, for performing well in classes, and for being so good. So this kind of white‑knuckled approach to science got me all the way to grad school, and I was pursuing a PhD in Earth and Environmental Science.

Now, at that point, I was just going through the motions in so many areas of my life that I had forgotten what it felt like to really be present. I think my colleagues and my fellow grad students probably would have said that I was polite, maybe a little quiet, nice, but kind of removed. I would go to all of the seminars and the parties, but usually I would get there just a little late or leave just a little early to avoid those extra moments of connection.

And in my research, I met every deadline. By all objective measures, I was doing well, but there was very little joy in the work. Sometimes it felt like I was looking at myself from this removed vantage point, watching someone else analyzing this data, publishing papers. But, more and more, I wasn't recognizing who that person was. Somewhere along the way, I had lost my sense of wonder at the world and, with it, I lost my sense of self.

So, at one point, in my final semester of grad school, I'm sitting on a bar stool at a local brewery, sipping on a cider, waiting for the rest of my lab to join for lab drinks. I'm exhausted, visibly tired, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, nails bitten down to angry stubs. I am just so ready to be done with this dissertation so I can move on to something else. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that my research isn't all that interesting. I'm burnt out. I'm fed up with it. And I certainly don't feel like I have much to contribute to science.

So I'm sitting there feeling a little sorry for myself when someone walks into the brewery who immediately catches my eye. Now, this person is kind of androgynous. They have this thick black hair that's cut short. They're wearing these black stud earrings, a tight black t-shirt, and the coolest tattoos I've ever seen up and down their arms. They have this undeniable swagger and this confidence. I'm trying not to stare, but my heart starts racing and my breath is catching as this person, who is undeniably cool, starts walking directly towards me and sits across from me at the table and introduces themselves as the new postdoc in my lab.

So I know that eventually the rest of the lab group did join us that evening, but I just remember talking to that cool postdoc for the whole evening. It turned out that we had so much in common. We had similar research interests, and explaining my own work on climate change and human migration to them, it suddenly didn't seem so boring.

We had been hiking at the same park at Arches National Park over the same weekend over the summer. We had multiple mutual collaborators and colleagues at different institutions around the country. We both shared a love for RuPaul's Drag Race. And before I left, I remember the two of us laughing at just how absurd it seemed that we had never crossed paths before that day.

As I was walking back to my car, getting ready to go home, I just remember feeling electric. My body was buzzing, and there was something about meeting this person who was so unapologetic, so completely themself, that it was almost like I'd been struck by lightning. And the first thought that popped in my head as I'm sitting in my car is, “I think I might be gay.” Followed by a second thought, “Fuck. That's inconvenient.”

Because that flash of lightning that had struck me, it illuminated the bars to the cage that had been trapping me in, this cage that I had built so slowly, so meticulously, that I had forgotten how to see the bars that were there. Once I saw the bars of that cage in this rainbow, yassified light, I could not unsee it. Suddenly, the parts of myself that had seemed so odd, so foreign, so queer, they suddenly made sense and they were dying to come out.

At this point, I had to make some major life changes because I wasn't willing to hide anymore. I ended a long‑term relationship that had grown cold. In doing so, I had to move out of my home. I took only the essentials: a toaster, a waffle iron, and Henry, my dog.

And I lost friends after I came out. People who were happy to know me when I was kind of a shell of myself seemed less interested in being around this more vibrant version of me. I fought with family, some of whom still can't understand the choices that I've made. It was like for some people in my life, they just couldn't fathom how I, this girl who was always so good, could blow up my life in this way and cause such a fuss.

But I also had friends who lifted me up, friends who loved me before coming out and continued to love me after. One of my best friends in grad school, I'll never forget, randomly, she came up to my desk one day and said, “You're a lot happier. I'm really happy for you.” And I just felt really seen from those simple words.

I made new friends. I felt embraced by the queer community. I learned some new things. I watched The L Word. I got my first pair of Docs. I went to my first Pride and I stayed out way too late at my first Pride, all rites of passage. But most importantly, I was learning myself again. I was almost meeting myself and finally looking in the mirror and trying to understand what I wanted and what I needed, maybe for the first time in my adult life.

Along the way, as I was meeting myself and really delighting in what I was finding, something else amazing happened. My sense of wonder at the world around me started to come back. I started to notice the flowers and the weird rocks and the blades of grass again. I didn't quite start making potions again, but I did invite magic back into my life. And I also fell in love with my research again. I was reminded of just how cool it is that I get to think about these complex problems in terms of how people interact with their environment and how communities can respond to climate change.

I know now that my queerness is my science superpower. It allows me to see the world in unique ways. It allows me to see connections between topics that others might miss. It really informs my dedication to elevating marginalized voices and to fighting for climate justice. It grounds me in the belief that the earth is beautiful and magical and worth protecting. And I think it makes me better able to support my students who they themselves might be trying to figure out who they are and how they fit in this world.

So, you'll be happy to know that, yes, I did date that cool, sexy postdoc from the brewery. And, yes, we did fall in love. But most importantly, I fell in love with myself again. And we cannot forget the wise words of Mother RuPaul, “If you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?”

Thank you.