The 2 AM Note That Led to Lauren Fisher’s Queer Awakening
Good morning everyone,
Mercury finally goes direct today (yay!), and we’re stepping into some of the best astrology of the year, with Venus (the planet of romance, beauty, and money) linking up with Jupiter (the planet of abundance) in Cancer from today through tomorrow. When I interviewed astrologer Celeste Brooks earlier this year about the astrology of 2025, she even suggested it's a good time to buy a lottery ticket.
It also feels auspicious to publish today's essay by Lauren Fisher—my former Harper’s Bazaar colleague and my newsletter editor since day one—about her expansive new love. Fun fact: I hired Lauren, as a shy LIM student, to be our intern back in the day. She quickly proved herself to be a star, and watching her grow into the self-assured, sharp, and hilarious writer and editor she is today has been such a joy.
This will be the final guest essay of the summer, and I'll be back with my musings in September.
At the beginning of 2023, during one of those sleepless nights when you plot to change your entire life, I typed five words into a new Notes app entry: “a transformative kind of love.” I didn’t know exactly what they meant — it was one of those 2 AM epiphanies you write down while half-asleep, certain you’ve just cracked some life-changing code, until it ends up lost in a clutter of grocery lists and half-finished to-dos. But this one stuck. For months, I carried the phrase with me, playing it on repeat in my head during dark moments, daydreams, and all the flashes of uncertainty in between. What I hadn’t anticipated was that those words would soon come to fruition for me — only not with the man I’d always pictured, but with a woman.
I never questioned my sexuality. From my first crush on a boy named Gregory in kindergarten, relationships with men were all I aspired to and knew. As a kid, my greatest romantic interests were Pierce Brosnan in Mrs. Doubtfire and Dennis Quaid in The Parent Trap (which is perhaps another story in itself). My diary pages were filled with hot-and-cold confessions about which boy from school I loved most that week, and I was the girliest girl you could imagine (which, I’d much later learn, says nothing about sexuality). The only queer women I really knew of growing up were Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, and I neither looked like, dressed like, nor was attracted to either one of them, so dating a woman never even crossed my mind.
It’s not that I wasn’t attracted to men, and I still am (which is how I know sexuality isn’t a choice). I just never realized I could also be attracted to women. I grew up on the Spice Girls, Barbies, and Disney Princesses, where femininity was celebrated in every form. I was raised in a family of strong women, and as I got older, female friendships, sisterhood, and feminism became the defining pillars of who I was. I loved and admired women deeply, but it never occurred to me that that love could be romantic or sexual.
As I approached my thirties, several shifts began unintentionally paving the way for me to discover my queerness. The first, and absolutely most significant, was therapy. By my late twenties, I had cycled through numerous situationships after years of convincing myself that I didn’t want to be in a serious relationship. It was easier to believe I was better off alone than to face how avoidantly attached and jaded I’d become — I’m a child of a messy divorce, and then when you factored in the current state of straight men? No thanks, I was good. But then the stillness of the pandemic hit and left me nowhere to hide from a very deeply repressed truth: I did want a relationship — and, more than that, I wanted to fall in love.
So I made it my mission in therapy to unpack everything I’d been avoiding: childhood trauma, insecurities, trust issues, anxiety — all the classics. For the first time in my life, I wanted to learn how to be vulnerable. I wanted to connect with my softness, my feminine energy. I’ve always considered myself open-minded, but this was different — I wanted to be open-hearted, to let someone in, to take a leap of faith.
Coinciding with my therapy work was an equally important factor in my bisexual awakening: the many, many hours I spent scrolling TikTok. Did my algorithm know I was queer before me? Yes, yes, it did. Suddenly, videos from bisexual creators started showing up on my For You Page — lists of quirks, habits, and life experiences they swore were “so bi.” I remember rolling my eyes, thinking, “What does that have to do with being bi? I do all of those things, too!” Reader, if I could go back in time and hold my own hands while saying, “you relate because you’re also bi, you idiot,” I absolutely would.
Naturally, the algorithm doubled down. Soon, I was getting detailed explainers breaking down the definition of comphet (compulsory heterosexuality, a term I’d never heard before) and personal stories from women describing their own experiences with it. Again, I related. This time, the wheels began to turn, but it still wasn’t clicking. And it wasn’t like it would have been an unwelcome revelation — far from it, actually. For years, I would constantly lament, “Ugh, I wish I could date women” (which, by the way, if you’ve ever genuinely said or thought those words, I’m now going to hold your hand when I say this: you, too, may want to dig a little deeper there).
The seeds were planted in my head, but I still couldn’t picture myself being sexually or romantically attracted to women. Unbeknownst to me, though, a perfect storm was forming. I was slowly opening myself up to both the idea of love and queerness at the same time — through therapy, through new queer female friends I made, and even through my work. At the time, I was an editor at Cosmopolitan, and editing sex and relationship content not only taught me a few new things, but also left me feeling more open, more curious, and more willing to question what I thought I knew about myself.
All of this led to the greatest catalyst in my bi-awakening: accidentally, and very unexpectedly, falling in love with my now-fiancée. It wasn’t an instant-romantic spark — the pieces didn’t all magically click into place when we met. We’d been internet friends for nearly two years — the ultimate modern-day slow burn — before I began to suspect there might be something more.
We bonded instantly: same sense of humor, same chaotic Gemini energy (I know), and a mutual love of Stevie Nicks that first brought us together. I’ve made countless Twitter and Instagram friends over the years, but this felt like something different, something I didn’t quite recognize. Our friendship deepened just as I was building a foundation of healing and openness in therapy, and I found myself trusting her with thoughts and feelings I rarely said out loud. We spoke every single day, more than I talked to many of my closest friends, and I cared about her with an intensity I didn’t quite understand.
Then came the small, electric moments that made me wonder — the way her name lighting up my phone made me smile, the compliments that felt like winning the lottery. Were we flirting? One thing about Geminis, though, is that we could accidentally flirt with a brick wall. So I told myself it was nothing. For months, I ignored countless signs that we had chemistry and a connection that went far beyond friendship. It made absolutely no sense to everything I thought I knew about myself and the relationships I aspired to.
But when we finally met in person after two years of being internet friends, I knew I wasn’t imagining things or making flirty jokes just because I was in a silly, goofy mood — there was something there. And we both felt it right away. Still, part of me clung to the idea that maybe I was only queer in theory, not in practice (which, in my head at the time, made perfect sense). I was honest with her from the start, she’d long been sure of her queerness, so she understood where I was coming from and made me feel completely comfortable exploring these feelings without any pressure. We knew there was a spark, but we agreed that if it didn’t work out beyond friendship, we’d just get drunk, laugh it off, and watch Golden Girls instead. A win-win either way.
We didn’t end up needing Betty White for backup. The moment we first kissed, I knew: not only was I bisexual, but this was different from anything I’d ever felt before. So I surrendered — not to the logic I’d always used to protect myself, but to my feelings. It was like finally unclenching a fist I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my entire life. I let myself sink into the vulnerability, the softness, the ease I felt with her. I stopped asking what it meant or how it would work, and just let it be. My grandma’s voice echoed in my head: “One day at a time.” Those words became my mantra — the way I inched forward into this giant leap of faith. And the thing was, once I took the leap, my late-in-life queer awakening didn’t feel like a huge shock to the system. It just felt natural.
Of course, the questions and anxieties still crept in — especially as I soon realized this wasn’t just a casual fling like my past situationships, I was falling in love. What did this mean for me? How would my family react? Would people think I’d been hiding in the closet for years? Was I bisexual, pansexual, just queer? Did the label even matter? How had I been an ally so immersed in queer culture all my life and not known this about myself? The doubts swirled, but the calm certainty I felt about my feelings for her far outweighed them.
Entering my first sapphic relationship helped heal wounds I didn’t even know existed. Gradually, I stopped recognizing the person I once convinced myself I was: a hyperindependent woman who loved her career more than the idea of a relationship, regularly half-joking about wanting a string of rich husbands, believing I was too jaded and cynical for true love. I found someone I felt comfortable being soft with. She gave me space to unearth the tender parts of myself I never got the chance to know—and showed me they were worth taking a risk for.
Looking back, I see that all the work I did in therapy wasn’t just about healing past wounds; it was about clearing space for the kind of love I’d wanted all along — even if it didn’t look like the one I’d always imagined. In fact, its unexpectedness turned out to be the most beautiful part of it all. Because what I found was exactly what I’d typed into my phone at 2 AM that night: a transformative kind of love. The kind that doesn’t just change your relationship status, but rewires the way you see yourself, the way you move through the world. The kind that feels like coming home to a place you didn’t know you’d been missing — until you get there and realize you’re finally, entirely, yourself. And it’s never too late in life to discover that.