I just turned 20 a month ago, but the levels of uncertainty of who I am and what I am meant for never left my teens.
I know that your 20s are for exploring and discovering new things and quirks of who you are. Essentially, you are meant to learn what makes you, “you”. While I know and understand that that’s what this period of growth is for me, I still feel as lost as ever.
Before coming into college, I never spared my sexuality a second thought. I always thought that I was straight. I liked boys, I was going to get married to a man, buy a house, and have kids with my husband. I never questioned that. To this day, I don’t know if I genuinely wanted that or if I was told to want that and I just subconsciously conformed to who I was told to be.
I always attributed my awkwardness and physical discomfort to the fact that boys always made me “nervous.” This past year, I realized that physical discomfort and the feeling of wanting to crawl out of my own skin wasn’t “butterflies,” it was my own body telling me that boys weren’t right for me.
I’ve tried dating boys, but every time I thought that something was about to happen, my entire body shut down on me and every fiber in my body was screaming that this wasn’t right. I found myself making excuses — going to the bathroom, standing up, putting space between us — anything to avoid the inevitable intimacy.
I realized after I went on a first date with one of the nicest guys I’ve ever talked to that I shouldn’t dread or fear the suggestion of physical intimacy, but I did. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him –– in fact he was sweet, cute, attentive, funny, easy to talk to, and overall a great person. Yet the thought of dating him filled me with a tightness and disassociation that I can’t quite explain.
It was at this point that I believed I was bisexual because I genuinely believed I was attracted to both men and women, but now I think that that was a more digestible transition for me to accept my sexuality as a whole (a canon event — I know).
That night when I got home from my date, I sat in my car for hours not wanting to believe what I was feeling. I don’t like men that way. And I don’t think I ever have. Love and attraction shouldn’t ever feel that way.
It was also at this time that I had feelings for a girl. I had for a few months now and I have never felt what I felt for her with a man. Ever. I felt safe, comfortable, and overall happier being around her. What I felt for her was real because it was genuine attraction and pure admiration.
I wanted to be around her all the time, I wanted her to sit close to me, I wanted her to make eye contact with me when we spoke and never break it, I wanted her to touch me and I wanted to touch her — I wanted all of that. I spent nights thinking about her and what our future could look like together. While I don’t have feelings for her anymore, I know that I did. And what I did feel was intense, raw, and how love and attraction should feel.
What I felt for her was purer and more honest from even our first interaction than any flirty conversation or date I’ve had with men in the last 20 years.
That fact alone is what scares me the most. I have lived a certain way for most of my life because I truly believed that my “butterflies” around boys was normal and just a part of love, but it’s not. I can’t help but think that I wasted my time fighting against who I am.
Learning and understanding who I am as a queer person is an uphill battle. I often feel like an outsider and a fraud to the LGBTQ+ community and that honestly gets really lonely. I don’t have a “oh that makes sense” photo from my childhood that indicated my sexuality early on and I didn’t ever have an inkling that I could be anything but straight before last year. But how can I expect to be accepted into a community when I don’t know how to accept myself?
I feel too straight to be gay, yet too gay to be straight. I just don’t know where I can stand.
At 20, I still don’t have it all figured out,but I do know this: love should simultaneously be comfortable and set you on fire. I simply won’t settle for less.