Growing up, I knew I was different. When shopping for clothes, I gravitated towards jeans, black and gray shirts, sneakers. Asking me to wear something pink was asking to be told off, and don’t even get me started on floral print. I played competitive sports growing up, especially basketball. I was practically married to the game and could hold my own with the guys. In my group of friends, I have always been more masculine: Giving my opinion on prom dresses sounded something like, “That one is nice” or “That’s a nice color, go with that one.” I always felt like one of the guys, but then again, I’ve always been confident in who I am and what I wanted, even though I was extremely insecure about the one thing in my life that I was scared to tell anyone.
In High School, my friends would have relationships, share first kiss stories, and tell me how in love they were with their boyfriends. I was always supportive, but at the time, I was starting to crush hard on this girl I met in the cafeteria. When I finally got the courage to ask her out, she said yes! We went out on some dates, mostly chilling after school and going to the football games together. And when we had our first kiss, it was completely different. When I kissed boyfriends, I had never felt like that. I had finally found the missing link, the intimacy and the deeper emotional connection. The electricity that strikes during these intimate moments was the thing that solidified for me that I was definitely into women. Yet, I wavered with this information for a couple of months before I said anything to anyone.
A few more months went by and I was falling for this girl, but I was graduating in a mere couple of weeks and she was a year behind me. We never talked about what was going to happen when I went to college, since I was staying in town. I decided to invite her to my graduation party with all of my family because I wanted to see if she would vibe with the people that mattered the most to me. Like most families, I would say mine is a little on the crazy side, half joking. We are loud and have big personalities which I feared would intimidate my girlfriend. Unfortunately, with all this talk I’d manifested my worst fears into a reality: the girl I loved was scared off by my family and she broke up with me via snail mail on my birthday. I was heartbroken, more heart broken than I was when I split with my boyfriend all those years earlier.
Throughout the following years, I dated a guy. I think secretly after that breakup I thought being “normal” would solve the heartbreak, but it never did. I also thought that maybe if I could force the connection with a man, these feelings I had for women would just go away. I thought something was wrong with me and that I was broken. Deep down, there was no escaping it. When I was twenty-three, I was dating a girl and I really felt like I had found someone worth spending time with. And even though the relationship was short-lived and only lasted a year, I knew after that relationship that there was no hiding it anymore. I had to embrace who I am, and stop running.
