# I Had Been Waiting For Something My Whole Life Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256/i-had-been-waiting-for-something-my-whole-life Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256/i-had-been-waiting-for-something-my-whole-life.md Podcast: [Coming Out & Beyond | Support for Women Questioning Their Sexuality](https://stenobird.com/podcast/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256) Published: 2026-04-17T04:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://annemariezanzal.com/coming-out-stories-beyond-podcast/ Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/fd8d51e4-8837-4b00-ba42-90e12f3799e2.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256/episodes/i-had-been-waiting-for-something-my-whole-life Duration seconds: 1636 ## Resource In this week's episode of Coming Out & Beyond , Anne-Marie traces the winding, decade-long road that led her from a single paragraph in an Oprah magazine to finally saying the words out loud — and finding the woman who would become her wife along the way. She begins in 2006, when an article about women who had left marriages with men to be with women cracked something open in her — a joy she couldn't explain and quietly tucked away. She walks listeners through every moment she tried to surface that truth: a therapist who made her feel like she'd failed a litmus test, a marriage counselor who chalked it up to a difficult relationship with her mother, and the years of silence in between. Then comes the patient — a small, fierce woman from Connecticut who signed her own hospice paperwork and told Anne-Marie she thought she'd been waiting for something her whole life. In that moment, something irreversible shifted. She shares the four words she typed into Google — late in life lesbian — and what happened next: an online community, a Facebook group with 180 members, and a woman named Tonda McKay from Nashville who put her in the friend zone and then slowly, over the next year, became the love of her life. Anne-Marie weaves in the music that accompanied all of it — Mary Lambert's "She Keeps Me Warm" and Macklemore's "Same Love" — songs she had cried at for years without fully understanding why. She reflects on what it means to carry a verdict you never agreed to, to mistake recognition for compassion, and to discover that orientation doesn't wait to be confirmed. It was already there, in every song that broke her open, long before she gave herself permission to know it. This episode closes with an invitation: you don't have to figure this out alone. Anne-Marie did that f… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256/episodes/i-had-been-waiting-for-something-my-whole-life/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/coming-out-beyond-support-for-women-questioning-their-sexuality-3916256/i-had-been-waiting-for-something-my-whole-life.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.