Tag: personal

This isn’t that different from what all the lovely people in this fandom have been saying, but all this has made me want to formulate some of my own feelings/my own story.

I’m luckier than a lot of people in that growing up my family wasn’t very religious or outwardly homophobic. (My mom tried to raise my sister and I Catholic, but I was allowed to drop CCD when they tried teaching us how gross and sinful being gay was.) But there were still a HUGE amount of things, both from within my family and outside it, that led me to not realize I’m a lesbian for 21 years. And when I did start realizing I liked girls, there were so many ways I was told it was okay, I was probably still straight. Every girl is a little bi. There’s always that one exception. Boys think it’s hot if you’re open to being with another girl. You can’t really know until you have sex. You just haven’t met the right guy. And I internalized the fuck out of that shit. 
In highschool, I had one “exception,” so I called myself straight, because just one didn’t mean anything, right? (And there was no way I was going to look at myself hard enough to see how very differently I felt about her compared to the boys I dated)
When I got to college, things felt more open and I started having a lot more “exceptions,” so I went with “mostly straight.” I had a boyfriend, after all. And then I went withbi.
And then last year, I started to realize that besides my boyfriend, there weren’t any boys I liked at all. And when he broke up with me, I felt almost relieved.
I still called myself bi for awhile, but then as I started to come out more and more to people, it didn’t feel right. I confessed to one friend that I didn’t think I liked boys.
She was the first one to really vocalize the possibility that I was gay, and once I labeled myself a lesbian there’s hardly been a day that went by she didn’t reference it, in jokes or talking about romance or just whatever.
And THAT, more than anything else, has helped me be comfortable with who I am. Having someone call me a lesbian, constantly affirming that that identity was real and valid and ME. And calling characters the lesbians (or the bi girls, the queer girls, whatever the case may be) helps with that too. It’s all just validation that we exist and out feelings exist, and a lot of us really really need that.