Editor’s Note: The following is an essay I wrote over winter break, as I was finally discovering some answers to my questions about my sexuality. I never saw myself reflected in mainstream queer media, so I wrote my own story. I hope this helps anyone who doesn’t yet know the words to define their sexuality, to find them.
CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of Disordered Eating
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With boys, there was always dread. A panicky feeling would rise the second I heard that a boy was interested in me. The thought of getting involved with him would send my nervous system into a frantic whirlwind. When my friends agreed that they got “nervous” before meeting a boy, I assumed they also felt the terror that raged through my mind and stopped me from doing normal things, like eating or sitting still. I misread my fear as an inability to manage my excitement, an emotional weakness I needed to overcome. Hooking up with a boy was the key to happiness, I swore, I was just too immature to handle it properly.
In my senior year of high school, I got involved with a boy who, upon our initial meeting, I was certain that I would never be attracted to. But he was into me, and he told my friend that he wanted us to hook up. When my friend told me, my blood froze. I absolutely did not want to hook up with him. But a part of me had already started reveling in his attention, and didn’t want to let go. I wondered if I would warm up to him after a while. So I swallowed my instincts, smiled and said of course I’d be down.
I spent all night scrolling through his Facebook photos, slowly but surely convincing myself that I liked his eyes, that I liked the way he wore his hair, that his music taste was so compatible with mine that there was no way that I wasn’t into him—unconsciously making a list of his attractive qualities, so that when we were face-to-face and my resolve to flirt was rapidly draining away, I could just pull up the list and get myself back in the mood again.
Within 24 hours, I had successfully convinced myself that I wanted to hook up with him. But in the week leading up to our date, my body had started uncontrollably shaking. I often had to lock myself in my room to calm down, after even normal interactions pushed me into a panic. It took an immense amount of mental effort to force down one pathetic bite of chicken, so I ended up surviving on plain oat crackers. Even though I acknowledged the gravity of my reaction, I dismissed it as an childish fear of hookups and romance that would disappear with more experience. This pain was worth it, because being desired by a boy was a luxury that I had to take advantage of. The night before our date, I sat at the dining table for hours, choking on a tiny spoonful of egg, and still believed I wasn’t making a mistake.
On the date, we just talked. I was surprisingly mean to him without really meaning to be, and kept compulsively mentioning my bisexuality. He later confessed that he’d been taken aback by my harshness and sensed that I was trying to make him leave. I persuaded him, and myself, that I had just been playing hard to get. After the date, I was a little disappointed that we hadn’t hooked up, especially because my friends had been so excited for me. I couldn’t stop thinking that this was my One Chance to Get Some Action. It was mandatory that I saw it through. So, on the ride home, I replayed every moment in my head—editing out the parts where I had felt uncomfortable or established a platonic distance and methodically replacing them with the attraction I knew I should’ve felt towards his dark eyes, his deep laugh. I quickly made the final mental switch that night, determined that I’d been too scared to make the first move, but that I truly did want it and would have no trouble next time.
And so it went—when I saw him two days later, it took me less than twenty minutes to initiate. When I asked him to kiss me, I felt nothing, and when he did, I felt even emptier. But I was so delighted to have successfully accomplished this terrifying task that I didn’t really consider whether I liked him. The tiny seed of satisfaction was enough to make the agony of the last week worth it.
Over the next two months, I would coax the seed out of its shell, contorting the feeble affection to fit the narrative that I was just as infatuated with him as he was with me. Once he started to show real interest in me, I did my best to match him, step for step, to prove that I was just as excited about our burgeoning romance. But even though we seemed perfectly compatible, my feelings for him didn’t come as naturally as I hoped. When he gazed at me with a goopy-lovey expression and I cringed, I told myself that I just wasn’t expressive. When he told me how much he liked me and I couldn’t say it back, I told myself that I was just emotionally guarded. Only over text, when he was just a projection of my own desires, did I feel enough affection to keep holding on. One day, he played me love songs, shirtless, on his guitar. I watched him from across the room, waiting to swoon, and wondering why I never did.
In March, he suddenly lost interest in me. When he told me it was over, to my surprise, a flood of relief washed over me. Being friends felt astonishingly better, and I ended up staying at his house for three hours, reveling in the ease of that dynamic. When I joked that he’d never made me come, he retorted, “Are you sure you aren’t a lesbian?” I blinked hard, startled by his bluntness. But I couldn’t shake his words, and by the time I left his house, I wasn’t sure at all anymore.
When I started college, I met a girl. For the first few weeks, I was completely infatuated with her, and she happened to feel similarly about me. Thanks to the events that unfolded, I finally felt overwhelming, organic attraction to someone for the first time in a while. Free from the cycle of forced feelings, I took a long look at my past relationships and realized that the boy wasn’t far off from the truth. While the label “lesbian” felt too narrow—I’d definitely had genuine crushes on boys before—I couldn’t ignore how rarely I was interested in boys, compared to how often I was into girls.
For years, I’d tried to define what exactly constituted a crush, because I was never quite sure if I had one or not. But after renaming my “strong friendship feelings” for girls as actual crushes, I realized how obvious they were. When I met my crush, I never considered the pros and cons of liking her, I just fell in. It was, in fact, completely abnormal to persuade yourself to like someone, or be terrified of seeing them. No more deliberation was needed; all I wanted to do was feel.
I always swore that I preferred boys over girls—even though the ratio of my crushes was always about five girls to one boy—because I underestimated my internalized homophobia. I desperately wanted to say that I had a boyfriend, that I lost my virginity, that I was hitting all the heterosexual milestones as enthusiastically as the other girls. So, despite being openly bisexual, I dismissed most of my crushes on girls as friendship and a purely aesthetic appreciation for the female body. At the same time, I hugely exaggerated my few heterosexual crushes, even fabricating some to fill in year-long gaps between each real one. This way, I could cling to the mainstream portrayals of straight romance that I worshipped in middle school, and never truly confront the raw vulnerability of being queer. I figured that if I couldn’t pinpoint why I felt so uncomfortable about all of this, then I was just overreacting—especially because everyone assured me that casually hooking up with boys was absolutely the right thing to do.
Now, I’m finally starting to take pride in defining myself outside the norm. But even as I become more confident in my queerness, the price of suppressing my instincts still remains. The belief that debilitating anxiety precedes all relationships is so deeply ingrained in me that my mind easily escalates small twinges of nerves into full-blown panic.
As the year goes on, I’m realizing that this toxic tradition of dreading relationships is outdated. But it’s not so easy to start seeing love where there was once so much danger. I’m not just coming to terms with my past. I’m learning how to rewire a mind. BP
