Coming out is rarely easy. It can be heartbreaking, quick, painful, weird, bizarrely funny or a long and drawn out process, but rarely do people describe the experience as easy. And from the outside looking in, you might assume that being a writer for a show that’s the obsession of lesbians everywhere would make the whole thing a piece of cake. Writer Lauren Morelli knows different.
In a happy and heterosexual relationship for six years, cemented with a marriage, it wasn’t until Lauren was working on Orange Is The New Black that she discovered her sexuality was a little different from what she thought. In an essay for PolicyMic, Lauren describes her experience:
Five months after my wedding, I flew to New York to start production on my first episode of Orange, and from that moment on my life fell into a parallel rhythm with Piper’s story in a way that went from interesting to terrifying in a matter of months.
Many women experience coming out as a single person but going from a heterosexual marriage to being gay and single is a hard transition, as Lauren discovered.