thelesbianlifestyle.com

Hi, my name is Rose. Hi, Rose!  I am a newbie on the blog, so I thought I would start out with a rather rough version of my coming out story. I wrote it at the age of 15 in a diary entry (you know, those really small “decorative” journals), and typed it up unabridged for all of you young dykes out there trying to sort yourselves out. It reads like a long affidavit, and the story is rather dramatic/traumatic at times, but eventually even your own story, no matter how personal and dramatic it may seem right now, will feel just as foreign and ethereally distant as this does to me. I hope you enjoy, and I will discuss more current topics soon!

I was twelve when I first attempted to identify as a lesbian, but I knew I was gay much earlier. In elementary school, I had a best friend whom I loved. She was tall and had this spunky liberality. I lived a rather conservative Catholic household with my two sisters and parents. The rules of the home were posted on the refrigerator in the form of a crinkled sheet of paper with the Ten Commandments superimposed on an image of two stone tablets. The doctrine of her world simply stated that as long as you did what you were told, you could do anything you wanted. In my world, that meant she only had to obey one commandment: honor thy parents.

Over time, I began to love her. To antagonize one of our classmates we used to kiss, while neither of us thought anything of it. It seemed natural. We were young, innocent, and happy together.

But every great story ends at some point. She moved away to a town in another state, exchanged the calico dresses of her female childhood for soccer shorts and t-shirts, and grew up. I grew up too. The distance became too much, and our relationship dissolved. I lost my place without her.

The last few years of elementary school and middle school became a tumultuous period where I felt so strongly that I could not “be myself”—for lack of a better phrase—without her that I became something different—something violently monstrous. My sisters grew away from me, despite our childhood closeness. I would tell my peers wild stories of my life to push them farther away. Nothing was honest, nothing felt real.

Half way through middle school, hormonal, and lost, I was attracted to a girl I had hung out with for a period of time in elementary school. She was tall and willowy, and had the air of a person who knew her place in the world, a quality I admired and envied. In fantasizing about her, I became angry and depressed and scared. My dad was adamantly against homosexuality—as he called it—I feared what he would think of having a gay daughter. One day I sat down in the mirrored, walk-in closet of my shared bedroom and cried.

I tried to commit suicide twice that year. I gained weight with all of the stress and depression. I began to cut myself. My mom—against my father’s will—put me into counseling. We would go together. I would sit on one end of the couch, my mother on the other, and the counselor positioned so that someone could draw an equilateral triangle between the points. I would cry, and blame my behavior on my anger towards my father or my sisters. But I would never tell the truth. Nothing would ever be resolved.

My mother realized that fact, perhaps at my expense. She never looked at my like she did my sisters. She read into my every comment, as if they held the secrets to the inner workings of my life. She hired someone to hack into my e-mail, she contacted parents of my peers, and investigated my friends’ activities. I wasn’t happy, and neither was she.

Freshman year of high school was hard. I played on the tennis team, and hated every minute of it. The cheers were painfully peppy, and I didn’t want to be reduced to the level of a cheerleader. The girls were bright, happy, blond, and pretty. I was a swurvy teenager slightly absorbed into her own issues, distracted by her own lack of complacency with the group. I didn’t dress up on game day. I rarely changed for matches. There was a week in October of that year when I seriously considered suicide. I had read an article in a Seventeen magazine at the orthodontist’s office about a girl who had committed suicide following instructions she received from a website. The site was still active. I logged on.

But I didn’t know how I would get enough potassium cyanide to do the job, and the cheapest scientific source company wouldn’t ship it until a month after it was ordered so that they could affirm that the client was not using it for my purposes. A month would have been too much time for my mother to realize there was a “fraudulent” charge on her credit card bill. I needed a faster option. One Thursday night in October, I swallowed twenty-four extra strength ibuprofen pills. I vomited immediately, and—scared and quite shaken—returned to my room.

Sometime during my sophomore year of high school I discovered the online component of the progressive movement. I loved politics and sometime during the 2004 election decided that I was going to run for president at some point in my life with the mission to help redefine the American approach to domestic technological development and re-instill in our country a work ethic. I began a blog, and began to write long posts on abortion and feminism. I liked the idea of feminism, and began to identify myself as a feminist. To me, being a feminist was like being a lesbian with no strings attached. It made me reach some sort of emotional equilibrium with my sexuality. But the issue remained on the back burner, about to boil over.

Diversity day of my sophomore year was frustrating. In my desire to shed every social part of myself, I had become obsessed with my grades and schoolwork. I had this sort of twisted idea that if I didn’t participate in the high school social scheme, I need not accept the social aspect of my character that dictated my sexuality. On this particular day, I was devastated by a B+ I had received on a test solely because I had been an emotional wreck the day I had taken it. Already on the brink of an emotional breakdown, I went to my next class where we had a speaker on mental illness—social anxiety in particular. Her story put me over the edge, and I cried silently at my seat. I knew what it was like to attempt suicide, to be overtly shy, to attempt to hide myself. I also knew that my experience, if a psychiatrist ever examined my history, would probably reach the conclusion that I myself had social anxiety, that that had been the problem that plagued me since childhood, that I had a mental disease. I had never felt so alone.

I went home and posted on my blog that I was lesbian, hoping that that brief simple post would allow me to feel as though I was not denying a certain part of me. My mother found out about the blog I had kept since middle school and read the post. When she approached me I denied it and deflected the blog onto the fact that I felt so estranged from my family by the way she had treated me differently. Blah, blah, blah. She attempted to find me a shrink, I objected. Been there. Done that.

The following summer was a blur. I was accepted and attended a program at MIT, where I almost came out to my peers, but decided against it. I spent the entire month following the program practicing the viola to get into an orchestra. My heart wasn’t in it, and I didn’t make it. I felt like I was repeatedly failing myself. I began to question my intelligence, my abilities, and why I, a junior, opted to take the hardest courses my high school offered. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I arrived at my sexuality. Well, right.

I started this school year a little older, wizened, mature. I realized I didn’t fit in at all with the group of girls I had been tagging along with for the past two years, and I started to talk to people outside my usual lunch table selection. I became a little happier, a little more at peace with the world. I re-fell in love with French, the language I had become obsessed with learning since childhood, and discovered a previously ignored talent for computer programming. I became more active in the online progressive movement and in feminism. I started a new blog, but it still wasn’t filling the void. I still didn’t come to terms with the one aspect of myself that continued to plague my thoughts.

One day in study we were talking about children and marriage and growing up. I said I would probably not get married and I would definitely not have children. After one girl said that I would probably change my mind as I got older, my friend had a different perspective. Rather hesitantly, his words gaining momentum with his confidence in his words, professed that I would never sit still long enough to get pregnant by a man. I laughed and said that I was going to repeat that. I am, because he nailed the issue on the head. I wasn’t going to get pregnant because I would never spend a night with a man.

Later that week, or a week later, I no longer know, I went to computer club. I guy I vaguely knew from the previous year when we both had a computer class together introduced himself. We had a mutual acquaintance from whom I had learned a lot about him. He was bi and had earned his nickname following a fantastic monologue he had given during a play audition. I told him I knew the story. He asked how, and we began to talk. Sometime during that conversation we arrived at sexuality. He said he shifted between gay, straight, and bi depending on the situation. He asked me what I was, I deflected the question. He said he assumed I was a lesbian. I said okay.

Which brings me to today. It puzzled me for days. Why couldn’t I answer his question? Why did I sheepishly ignore him, and allow him to draw his own—accurate—conclusion? I wish I could have just answered him. It would have saved the conversation, I would have been happier being “out” to one person on this earth. But I didn’t. Instead, I anxiously await the next opportunity. Yes, I am gay.