So we meet again single Valentine’s Day

Another snow storm to help level my own steady stream of bitterness and anxiety with the collective stir crazy winter bitter blues of everyone else in the state.  See how the snow covers the bottom half of the window? This is my preferred state of packed away peeking up.  I can see branches, cables, a streetlight.  I cannot see the road, people’s windows, or anything anchored in my own reality.  Like train rides and lying in bed, this is a stage for overactive imaginations.  I’m trying to resist the pull to retreat.  I could easily look at this for the next 3-4 hours and play out all my fears and dreams and potential conversations during the next week or the rest of my life.   

I don’t want to think about how lonely I am. Each year I think perhaps the next Valentine’s day will be the one.    My desires and hope are generated by the dream of someday having a requited love affair or at least someone in my arms.  This dream is the source of energy I need to get through day to day activities like getting out of bed and showering and refilling prescriptions and driving to therapy.

But the dream I depend on to survive is in direct conflict with its own execution.  It eats away at the time and space needed to achieve something close to it.  Would you rather spend an evening with the satisfying romance in your head and an imaginary touch that triggers real endorphins?  Or sending out more messages to people that don’t respond, having more uncomfortable, draining first date conversations that feed the overwhelming sense of hopelessness constantly hanging in the air when I’m not under covers or driving or sitting up late at night when I can pretend everyone else has left Earth but me and my thoughts and my dog.

The passage of time scattered with all these failures doesn’t provide much incentive to continue the effort of staying rooted in reality.  I spent last Valentine’s Day pushing glitter back and forth on a piece of paper while pretending to create samples of semi romantic cards that children would be forced to exchange at school.  Really I was lost in thought, like I am now, thinking of Valentine’s Day past and the irony that I should be chosen to sell this holiday to anyone.

I remember a counselor at my high school handing out candy to kids in the cafeteria one year. My friend pointed out that she was only approaching the kids like us that look sad.  He was right.  It was a proactive effort to counter the unintended effects of this day.  I hadn’t realized how obvious loneliness was and how deliberately ignored it may have actually been.  I continue to obsess over this possibility of transparency and stigma and now, the worry of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My dreams for myself have evolved a lot over the past few years.  I realized a while ago I probably won’t ever have a husband.  It took a few more years to realize I might not ever have a “career” or a job that defines me or illuminates my potential.  Maybe I’ll never be off medication and maybe I’ll never be a size 6.  More recently I’ve accepted the possibility that I’ll never have children and maybe I’ll never own a home.  These are all dreams that have been, to varying degrees, difficult to let go of. But this last dream.  The dream of intimacy, of knowing what romance feels like at least once, having access to someone’s emotions and body and them having access to mine.  To cuddle.  This is a dream I can’t live without while I also can’t seem to make happen.  I wonder at what point I will just live two parallel lives, one that lasts a few hours each day where I make money and absorb nutrients and another that allows me to access the things I want most in life in the only form I can attain them, in dreams.

It’s hard out here for a weird lone wolf

How many subversive communities will I try to join before just accepting that I am one particularly unique snowflake?  Not to brag. I’m an especially unskilled snowflake.  My generation gets a lot of criticism because we were apparently damaged by some myth that we are all special.  This is an odd concept to me.  My distinguishing qualities have never struck me as a comfort.  No one has ever accused me of having too much self esteem.

In middle school I sat at the reject table for lunch.  Other kids would leave trash and pools of liquid on it.  Teachers would come into the lunch room and that was the worst part.  You can hide in a classroom and pump out papers that are, more or less, just like everyone else’s.  But the social order was clear in the cafeteria.  We were the bottom rung and we were on display for the adults whose job it was to evaluate us.

This type of stress accumulates into baggage. Like the stress of constantly counting the number of kids in the class so that, should you have to break into groups, you will immediately know whether you will be the remainder.  Some day you realize the other tables weren’t particularly interesting.  You harbor no grudges against anyone but you walk into a room of people and it no longer matters who, you just can’t find a sense of ease.

There’s a lot of talk about being proud of your differences.  I was once at a wedding and someone was dressed like devo.  That’s fine.  People should be free to wear dresses that look like raw meat.  But we should be honest.  The weirdness we worship is often only superficial.  Most people are indistinguishable outside of the act.

One thing I hated about those lunches was that I didn’t even like the other kids at my misfit table.  We were misfits for different reasons.  Qualities we possessed in disproportionate amounts and unusual combinations included: fatness, femininity, butch-inity, learning disabilities/previous homeschooling, being plagued by rumors of gay indiscretions, poor fashion choices ranging from severely baggy, a bit pajama-y and even a zipped up parka worn all day to produce the effect of marshmallowy.

Sometimes, one of my fellow misfits would cackle at her own, deeply unfunny jokes and I wanted kids and teachers alike to understand that while I would never be rude to her, I did not in fact think she was funny either.  Being a fat kid, I longed to wear the clothes I actually wanted so it was hard not to feel a bit critical of one of my close friends at the table for choosing to wear the same dirty oversized sweaters and pajama bottoms every day.  I felt guilty for frequently siding with the enemy in my mind: the same judgements who rejected me.  It dawned on me back then that the only thing we really shared was the fact we had no where else to sit.

The concept of finding one’s identity carries so much potential.  I imagined adulthood would come with a likeminded set of individuals that I would one day share these stories with.  My fellow misfits (because some are still friends and some are Facebook friends) seem to have flourished in the identities they uncovered.  They belong to underground cultures, above ground cultures, groups of starving artists, two of them are married, two of them have great jobs and networks and new friends that they are also close to, another is still making it in his own way.

I never really found those things but not for lack of trying.  How many times do you go to a queer event or gathering based on social justice issues?  How many new environments can you feel alienated in? You think you’ve finally isolated your differences and found a place where they are less visible.  But you walk in and there is still a wall between you and everyone and no one seems to hear you.  There is no essential quality that bonds you to an entire group or meeting or bar or parade.  Most people are outcasts merely because of circumstances.  Others of us are just outcasts.  I’m finally starting to accept that I am in the latter category.  I am no longer searching for community.

I wonder now if that table of misfits is the closest I’ll ever feel to fitting in.  If I’ll forever be eating meals and listening to that cackle, torn between a righteous act of unconditional acceptance or wearing a sign that says I’m not like that, I’m just different.

Another Sunday of it’s not getting any better, it’s actually getting worse

When I was seventeen, I had a habit of drinking until I blacked out.  My parents had to intervene on several occasions once dealing with the police and once with an ambulance.  Behind the scenes were usually two people: Ashley and Brian.  While Ashley was my friend, or, what I thought at the time, my soulmate, Brian was a freshman with a massive propensity for getting in trouble.  My friends hated him and seemed to do a better job of repelling him.  Brian latched on to me, often playing pranks on me that I never laughed at and then trying to redeem himself in ways that were even worse.  After getting gas one time, I returned to the car, grabbed a sip of water and immediately spit it out all over the wheel and and the dashboard.  Brian had filled my water bottle with vodka procured from his father’s collection.  His 9 year old brother was in the backseat and they were both cackling.  Each time he pushed me too far, he would lure me back by either stealing more of his dad’s liquor or showering me with designer perfumes stolen from the local mall.  I don’t know if rules exist because people like Brian don’t care about right and wrong or if people like Brian do things simply to break existing rules.  This morning I saw him turning his car onto my street as I was driving to work.  I knew it was going to be a bad day.

When I came out as a lesbian, I assumed things would get better.  That the love life I had been lacking all along would finally fall into place now that I had declared its preferred form.  I have always been a cynical person, but this was a narrative I had been duped into believing without question, just like I assumed my massive weight loss would mean I would suddenly be more valuable to the world.  But really nothing has changed.  The isolation continues to be my defining quality.  I see happy people coupled off, giggling, discussing the hassle of joining bank accounts and some of those people are queer and some are fat.  Whatever the reason I’m alone, those two qualities do not seem to be factors.  Whatever quality it is that keeps me single year after year, I cannot pinpoint it, overcome it, come out about it.  I endure it.  I say the world’s not fair so why should I expect anything from it? But I don’t feel any better, I feel worse.  Being alone for one’s whole life has its own set of stigma.  One woman I met online demanded to know, why have you never been in a relationship?  What was she missing?  Maybe she knows now.  Maybe that’s why we went from speaking all day through texts to not talking anymore after two dates. On dating sites, there’s a question asking would you ever date someone who’s never been in a relationship before?  It is reliably one of the questions that me and the potential match differ on.

Some people go through bouts of loneliness but I have only ever known this state and this lonely single life is self-perpetuating beyond my control.  It’s not a feeling I get between relationships or when my relationships start to feel inadequate.  It is a lifestyle and no one, friend or professional, seems to be able to help me out of it.  I have learned not be open about it to too many people, because many are quick to generate a list of things they believe are wrong with me.  When other people perceive you as a failure, they find the qualities to confirm why you are a failure that fit their understanding of the universe.  That way they can blame me for it and keep it away from themselves.  Wear makeup, put yourself out there, dress more femininely, shave your legs, find god, speak in a more enthusiastic voice, think more positively, have you heard of the law of attraction?  These are the forces that are hard enough to battle even when you are a success by at least some measures.

To say that I’m no longer present at work is a strong understatement.  I fidget with glitter for five or six hours by the door while staring at racks of handmade paper, wondering why my coworkers don’t like talking to me, whether I’ll ever have a normal life, why people consistently misinterpret what I say when I feel like I can read people’s thoughts.  Lately the fog has been worse.  I arrive and keep my hands busy.  By the end of my shift there is glitter everywhere and a bunch of cards I’ve torn up before anyone could see them.  I can no longer stomach making sweet cards for the same four of five occasions.  I actually don’t think I ever could.

Today I explained to a customer the different ways her daughter could make a book for a class report.  Pointing to our simplest kit, she said like this one but easier.  I tried to explain different methods and why they might be more challenging.  After a while, and after we closed, she said that’s it? That is everything you have?  I didn’t speak, I only smiled.  My daughter made an incredible book from one of these.  She followed a kit of instructions.  I have a shelf of handmade books.  A beautiful shelf and a testament to the intersection underemployed solitude, introversion and clinical depression.  My daughter’s also a brilliant poet.  It’s not enough to suck at my sales job, I have to agree with a rude woman that two of my passions that keep absolute despair at arms length have been mastered by an eight year old who talks to me with more authority than I talk to anyone.

A similar thing happened with the women looking create a recipe book. I showed them a book meant specifically for storing recipes, something I would never even assume existed and have no idea why anyone should expect us to carry.  That’s it?  A man asked for a birthday card specifically for daughters.  I showed him the one we had on the wall.  That’s it? That is very bad.  He didn’t mean the card, he meant the selection.  I smiled.  There’s a CVS across the street but no one seems to know that.

Being lonely has effectively thrust me back into the closet.  I don’t care to speak about my orientation as a hypothetical with people I barely know.  That was something I struggled to do with the people I knew best, with people who had passed out on me and revealed intimate secrets of their own escapades for years.  I leaned as close as I could to a friend on the steps of Union Square and asked how do you know if you like men or women, if you’ve never been with either?  He thought about it.  He talked in a clear conversational voice that I felt was indecently loud even surrounded by skateboarders and tourists and protesters and only a few blocks away from Stonewall.  I leaned in and told him I felt uncomfortable, like other people might be listening.  It was the first time I had ever talked about myself this way.  I don’t blame them he laughed, it’s a really interesting topic.

The last woman I was with five years ago, didn’t get my solitude either.  I just assumed you’d been with people before.  I had no reasons for her.  When I have no reasons, people just fill in their own.  I’m sick of explaining to people that I wore make-up for many years.  Brian had stolen me a very nice collection.  I’ve had make-up artists do me up before a night on the town but I hated the way I looked.  The people that think I look good in make-up have no concept of where the best me resides, but they don’t respect my self-awareness because I always seem to be at my worst self.  I even had a respectable purse collection and I gave it to the woman I was with five years ago.  I felt guilty for dumping her even though her bad habits for quickly becoming mine.  She had confirmed my suspected feeling, I did like having sex with women.

If I withhold information, it’s because I don’t want to be mistaken for something I’m not just because I’ve never found a stable identity. I’ve seen more of the world than I’ll admit to most people.  Unlike my coworkers who boast about their travels, those experiences are remarkable privileges to me, things that haven’t made me wiser or smarter or accomplished, just lucky.  I can’t stand the conversation that follows from when I was in Barcelona…when I was in Barcelona, I was lonely and I ate tapas and admired its architecture but I avoided its crowds and I saw art but it also made me feel sad.  When I was in the old city in fez, I felt lost in a new way, I felt like an intruder in a specific way, and I felt lonely in a familiar way.  The smell of Greece was remarkably similar to the smell of my Greek friend’s family basement.  In Scotland, I blushed every time I ordered food because the waiter’s accent was such a turn on.

Some people know that I have always dreaded the thought of my own wedding, the few people I know forced to interact while I perform an intimate yet archaic act built on compulsory heterosexuality.  But I hope that one day I find someone I love, who loves me back, and is willing to try and spend the rest of her life connected to me.  What nobody knows is that I hope she wants a wedding badly because I’ll gladly go through the motions and, unlike the grooms I encounter, I won’t act hassled or disinterested or stressed beyond belief.  I’ll act excited and engaged and I’ll have opinions about what I prefer but I’ll let her make all the final decisions because its for her.  I hope that we’ll choose the slightly textured pale pink invitations because they’re beautiful and I don’t care if they are informal and I don’t care if they are feminine.  I want it to have my own wedding invitations to dote on so badly, I can’t even talk about that dream with other people.  Clinging to the hope of finding someone means the recurring disappointment and fear that it hasn’t happened and that it never might.

I have heard that Brian is no longer gay.  As much as I dislike him, I know that this means something in him has been defeated. His father, who had a constant cycle of foreign nanny girlfriends that were always a bit younger than I am now, couldn’t accept that his son is just that way.  His nine year old brother, who had met several of Brian’s boyfriends, once asked him, why does dad hate gay people? For a kid obsessed with owning a Mercedes, it was an unexpectedly innocent moment.  Brian couldn’t answer but he swore his brother to secrecy until he turned twenty-one.  Brian liked driving his dad’s jaguar and the promise of a trust fund.  I suspect he might be enjoying the house behind mine, a house his father bought years ago, even as I write this.

I have two dates coming up this week, neither of which seem very promising.  One is with a married woman in an open relationship with two kids.  I don’t see us picking out wedding invitations any time soon.  Another is with a woman who looks nice, but I get the impression she is more interested in local sports than discussing micro-agressions, gay shame and the merits of introverts.  The truth is, none of the people who are interested in the things I seem to like are responding to my thoughtful messages.  The last two people I was supposed to go on dates with flaked out on me, never to follow up.  Several people have started talking to me only to delete their profiles days later.  I’m desperate for contact.  I haven’t been on a date in months.  I haven’t even kissed somebody, much less explored their body in five years, since that one woman.  I am not as idle as other people seem to assume but I’m not ready to talk about how painful this all is with people I barely know.  I don’t feel I’m even moving forward.  Just retaining hope and being met with rejection and disappointment, friends who don’t know what to say and people that are less than friends feeling free to scrutinize.  I just don’t know.

Tuesday

Do you ever go so long without getting a text or phone call or email that you convince yourself your phone must be broken and your internet down and then you finally get an email and your heart beats faster only to realize it’s spam and that nothing is broken, you’re just really lonely?  Why isn’t there a word for that feeling yet?  

Happy people are draining me

Do you ever feel so down about yourself and what you are doing in life that it’s too hard to be around people because it feels like they have everything you want?  I am so bitter around even the people I love that I can’t stand being around them.  I am actually furious around friends because I feel like every topic of conversation about their lives is flaunting something I would kill to have like a career, or a partner or a group of friends who share my interests.  They just think I’m too depressed to function normally and probably believe they are doing all they can to help just by inviting me.  I feel better alone because I can focus on connecting to other people’s pain by watching or reading something sad.  It has gotten to the point where I want intimacy and friendship and something to be proud of so badly that I can’t be around people because I’m being exposed to everyone’s connections.  I am a lone wolf but I am sick of being this lonely.  

another nice sunday with no succulents

I think I’ll buy the succulents myself today. Didn’t I think I was clever, drawing a comparison between myself and a myth? My life is not a Woolf novel and I’ve never thrown a dinner party. A Sunday without a work shift is rare. A warm day of April in this town is rare. I draw arbitrary lines to classify the severity of my illness. Only an ill person would stay inside today. I tell my mother we’ll buy the succulents on this day. She looks up from her computer screen. She’s revising proposals. She makes money fighting AIDS and bullying. I don’t really make money and it seems people no longer expect me to. No one could have foreseen my desire for succulents. I, too, was surprised that I could be seduced into gardening by listening to co-workers discuss wedding bouquets. I can’t secure a bride, not even a lover, but I don’t want to miss out on flowers too. My mother doesn’t ask questions.  We go to the farmer’s market.

I read Mrs. Dalloway ten years ago. The teacher let us vote between Joyce and Woolf.   There were only four boys in the class and they groaned when Woolf prevailed. The novel confirmed what I already suspected: moments do not exist in isolation but my experiences of them do. I started failing classes when the towers fell on live television on the fourth day of school that year. Everyone was trying to get into Harvard. I was trying to get high in the woods with Ashley. I missed her presence at school. I still feel her absence in my life; she might have even enjoyed my writing and not just because so much of it is about her. My guidance counselor did not understand why I had been so affected by the attack since I had not personally lost anybody. The kids on those planes though. I shrugged to his question but at night I slept with the lamp on. I started my first round of anti-depressants when my midterm grades arrived.

My coworkers think I’m on the spectrum. They talk to me slowly and assume I don’t understand the most basic of social cues. My stuttering and the monotone cadence of my voice both stem from the social anxiety, not autism. This is a distinction that even my closest friends conflate.

One morning, we are preparing the store for Easter as my coworkers discuss their siblings’ flawed lives. They say thinks like “I don’t want to toot my own horn but I think I came out the best of all my siblings”. They comment on my lack of contribution to the topic but don’t seem to infer the obvious: I am the black sheep they are talking about. Then they reminisce about how they used to get high with a boastful longing for their rebellious younger selves. They make a joke about me and LSD. It’s funny to them because I don’t even drink. It’s funny to me because they don’t know why. They look at me and giggle and I pretend not to have heard. “What was that?” I ask as though I haven’t been able to follow the conversation because I’m too busy stacking stuffed bunnies into baskets. “Nothing!” they holler with a quick smile and return to merchandizing.

I hate myself for not trying harder to resist parallels to cliché literary allusions. Sometimes a trip to buy flowers is just a trip to buy flowers. It doesn’t have to dig up all of your accumulated insecurities. It doesn’t have to trigger this degree of regret. You can browse a greenhouse without heartache.  The journey to buy succulents is supposed to carry a simple message: I’m trying to enjoy my survival.

The outdoor selection is spectacular, an entire table full of voluptuous spikes. A father on the opposite side of the table asks his two young children which ones they like most and their mouths start to water.  I feel creeping shame as my mom effectively asks me, her 28-year-old daughter, the same question.

I once found a photo album sitting in my grandfather’s basement. In it, there were faded pictures of my adult aunt walking through the woods with her parents. I knew immediately what this meant: Cathy spent her weekends taking walks with her parents. There were no additional albums full of my aunt celebrating major life events.  I foresaw this very outing five years ago in that basement. I am reliving her life. Eventually, I will drink every night until my own brother can no longer follow my stream of dialogue on the phone. I cling to the fact I don’t drink.

It would be nice to have a garden of outdoor succulents, but my parents’ house blocks the sunlight from hitting their yard. We enter the greenhouse and locate the indoor plant section. There are two succulents. As I am staring at them and considering which window they’d thrive best in, my mom is making the same expression she wears when served undercooked poultry: a scrunched nose that means ‘yucky’.  I know better than to react to this face. If I pretend the plants are exactly what I want, she’ll come to respect them.

We walk through the aisles until my mom loses her voice and can barely breathe. She waits outdoors where she isn’t as allergic to the air.  I am admiring some potted plants beside a couple that has been slowly strolling and pointing while holding each other’s hands. I see the woman’s face and swallow the sudden lump in my throat.  How glib it was to think I could simply buy flowers without dragging baggage through the greenhouse.

Sophia was a member of the Expos, my elite 8^th grade softball team. I don’t remember our track record but I do recall the pleasing way her outfit draped on her lean frame; how she hit home runs but strolled casually around the bases like she was mouthing fuck you to the other team and a little bit to ours too.  I admired her boyish nonchalance as she won us the game.  She wasn’t all angst though: she clapped for me when I was at bat; she made room for me on the bench even though I didn’t want to sit with the team.  She was better at the game than I was but we both rolled our eyes when the pitcher shed tears (which was after every game) or the right fielder struck up conversations with friends on the opposing team as pop-ups dropped around her. My longing to be close to Sophia scared me.  I avoided interacting with her entirely.

For a second, I feel a certain contentment that those feelings have been somewhat resolved and she will never have any idea the role she played in them.  I’m thankful my face has changed more than hers so we don’t have to strike up an awkward conversation about what we’ve been doing for the last decade and a half.  But the feeling melts as I realize the man beside her is likely to be her husband.  What if they are planning the garden for the yard of the house they just moved into? A list rapidly generates in my mind of all the things she’s likely to have experienced between our last meeting and now: high school boyfriends, a college major, unpaid entry level internships, breaking up, being broken up with, happy hours, getting her first job that she actually cares about, meeting someone she wants to settle down with, moving in together, promotions, wedding invitations, in-laws.

And then, as though a reflex, I start to generate my own list of more compromised ambitions: the career that never began; the awkward dates that led nowhere; watching Ashley’s mental health unravel; trying to hide from my mom that Ashley had been expelled and institutionalized; getting used to failing high school tests; crying so hard I tried to slap myself out of it; my lingering obsession with the children on those planes; 8 years of unrequited love for a friend; watching Ashley crumble after the trial when the assaulter was declared not guilty; explaining to several gay men why I didn’t want to wear that dress; six hand-penned journals full of pain; the mess of pill containers on my dresser; the paper flowers taking over my childhood living room; the poetry collection I acquired my senior year of college; the customers who correct my pronunciation of ‘aubergine’; my resistance to prescriptivist grammars; the books on gender and prison and race; the customers who scream at me about wedding programs; the daily discussions about my mangers’ wedding bouquets; the wish to be able to hold someone else for one night; the mounting resentment for the gay marriage movement; the bitterness; the inability to forget.

I often wonder how my life would be different if I had held it together in high school, if I had recovered from tragedy as fast as my friends seemed to.  All those years of working hard might not have felt like a complete waste.  Maybe I would have learned to drink in moderation and not needed to take pills to get me out of bed in the morning.  I wonder whether Anna and I would have bonded over Mrs. Dalloway in the giant wooden chair at the park, shortly before she discussed it at her admissions meeting and they gave her the full scholarship.  Would I still have felt the pain and would I still have learned to deal with it?

I remember the confusing day I got back a pop quiz in English and I actually passed, not because I gave a damn about my grades, but because I got it: I knew that when we bump into strangers downtown, we become bound by webs that stretch thinner as we get further away from one another but always remain delicately intact;  I knew about the feelings you have for a friend that you can’t express, how everyone thinks she’s crazy because she’s willing to strip at the party with hardly any alcohol, and how she has a way of feeling life that others can only witness; I knew that some people struggle harder than most realize until it’s too late, and for people like us, each day entails a choice between an indefinite stretch or an abrupt course down.

My college writing teacher said that some poets refuse to use modern references so as to make their work more timeless, more serious.  I reject this notion entirely. My writing needs to be firmly grounded for my exact coordinates, where personal grief intersects collective trauma.  My words plot out my coping mechanisms and I need them to be specific, accessible, available.  Such mechanisms include: reading each installment of dykes to watch out for when you’re searching for friends; smoking a joint with Ashley in the alley behind the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; tucking your cell phone in a drawer and reciting Caedmon’s hymn aloud when you’ve just sent a message that says I’ve been in love with you for six years, please respond; buying chalk paint at home depot so you can scribble ne’er fear the heat o the sun’ above your bedroom door because you need to be reminded;  enjoying rain because everything moves slower, like no one wants to get where they’re going and because nature has a way of achieving equilibrium with my mind’s illness; sticking to beliefs even when they alienate others around you because seven years later you’ll realize that song was sexist and that neo nazi did make you feel ashamed; accidentally standing up for yourself because your mental filters short-circuited under the pull of your heart.  I want to remember that my education was not a fast track to financial success, even though that was what it intended to be.  But look.  Here I am with some coping skills.

 

Bitterness and Passing

Snippets of Not Passing:

I was called a lesbian by a boy in first grade before I knew what lesbian meant.  In kindergarten, I overheard two older kids debating about whether I was a boy or a girl. My seventh grade science teacher referred to me as a boy in front of the class for an entire year.  He was well meaning but the kids who laughed each time he mis-gendered me were not.  Nobody overtly commented on how wrong it seemed for me to be in a dress, but I got the feeling other people could sense my aura of humiliated defeat.  Their silence was almost as bad as cackling.

Sleep-away camp was a nightmare.  Not just because of the complete lack of rechargeable alone time but because a room of 15-20 preteen girls bond by trying on each other’s dresses, putting on make-up before dances and thoroughly reporting on every interaction they had with a boy that day.  Even if I had the energy to fake interest in their world, I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t fit into their non-plus sized dresses and boys were not interested in courting me.

In high school and college I had no sexual experiences. Part of this was because I was still closeted and battling my own internalized homophobia, but a lot of it was because I was so conventionally unattractive that straight guys wouldn’t step within a certain radius of me, even the ones in long term relationships with my closest friends.  One of my best friends, who I am still really close to, came out to me at 16 while we were attending a queer film festival he dragged me to.  I was hurt when he chose to go to prom with his less close, but feminine, pretty and popular female friend but I understood why he made that decision because I understood the laws that govern high school.  My back-up, a recalcitrant gay freshman who I had spent the year giving rides to, also found a prettier, feminine senior girl to take him to the prom. I road to the dance in a limo van (which is really just a van with a driver as we found out that night) with 10 other people, all of whom were paired off.  As they danced, I sat in a red sequined dress that had to be returned and altered twice before it was large enough for me to squeeze into for a few hours.  The night confirmed what I already knew was true: I would never have regretted it if I just hadn’t gone.  (I will trust my kids to make decisions about whether or not prom is good for them.)

Reflection:

Looking back, I see my own strength.  I had an innate sense of self.  I couldn’t tone down my stone butch persona, even before I was conscious of what it was or meant.  I endured the stigma and the isolation and pain brought by being non-gender conforming, something that others had already been interpreted to mean even more.  And these experiences shaped many of the great qualities I love about myself today like my ability to empathize, connect with and defend people who’ve endure similar or different problems.  However, these childhood scars are something I am still learning to deal with.  I resisted accepting my sexuality until I was 19.  It felt like everyone else was prematurely placing me in a box against my will.  I might have wanted to have sex with women, but I also wanted to be loved and appreciated and desired.  The box I was being forced into didn’t seem like it would usher me towards any of the latter things.  One night, when I was 17, someone at a gathering said ‘raise your hand if you think [my name]’s a lesbian’.  My friends all raised their hands and smiled at me.  I couldn’t separate my sexual desires from the resentment I felt for being placed there.

It’s impossible to work out who you might have been had you not had the type of childhood experiences you pray your own child will not be subjected to.  I’d still be quiet and shy, introspective and introverted.  But maybe I’d be less compassionate, less interested in social issues, less patient with the people that others ignore or avoid.  Would I still have all the social anxiety?  Could I have avoided years of feeling isolated in various schools, cities and jobs if I had honed some core social skills during adolescence and young adulthood when I was just trying to survive with so much loneliness? Would I feel less antagonistic towards people when I suspect they would have been mean to my former self?  When you grow up fat and then lose weight, you can retain your fat political identity even though you are no longer read by others as a fat person.  I hear the things ‘nice people’ say about fat people and weight when they think no one in the room is being targeted.  This is how I  feel whenever an absent person is labelled weird, stupid, or has some quality that the accuser doesn’t know how to classify and therefore has to degrade.

 

So much bitterness:

I think about these things because I’m 28 and  I have never been in a relationship of any kind. I have trouble relating to and opening up to people like acquaintances and co-workers and very often, friends.  I don’t want to be so aloof but my experiences in life have been different from most people.  I’d rather not reveal all of this baggage because frankly, this isolation is stigmatizing and and fosters the acute loneliness and depression that there’s not much space for discussing unless I’m writing here or talking in therapy.  People discuss their upcoming weddings, having petty arguments with partners, weekend activities that involve mini trips or building gardens.  I wish I could share  stories like these too or provide insightful advice to people’s problems.  I wish I could pass as someone who knew about these things or could even hold my own in a conversation about them.  The truth is I’d kill just to have the types of problems they are experiencing.  I am proud of who I was and who I’ve become but it’s interfering with my ability to be, if not happy, just less lonely.

I have come to terms with these struggles as part of my queer narrative.  The shame and social anxiety I learned from school and peers. The repression that ensued.  This unbreakable loneliness and the intense social anxiety that is interfering with my potential to have a career, a partner, a family and a lifestyle that involves fighting over bills and who makes dinner.  It’s six years out of college and my peers from high school seem to be getting married all at once.  The girls I went to camp with are showing off their pregnant bellies on Facebook.  I thought they were so immature at 13. I wanted them to stop squealing so loudly in front of the mirror while they talked about how gross body hair on is.  But they grew up and moved on and formed lives and probably don’t remember those days as vividly as I do.  I am the one still conflicted over whether or not to get lunch each day because there is no one to eat with and the solitude is not a choice but it is routine.  These things dig at me a bit but, I’ve also understood it as dealing with a queer childhood and the influences that made my development a much different experience than most people’s.  I have resigned myself to this path because I’ve always been the slowest to get going but the most thorough by the finish.

 

So much bitter:

But here’s where I’m becoming bitter in ways I can’t resolve.  Several of the friends I went to high school with, the ones who didn’t really spend much time with me when they were hanging out with their boyfriends, the ones who made ‘harmless’ jests about my masculine demeanor, and the ones I’ve grown closer to after coming out and healed the past wrongs with as I help them between relationships and they listen to me be depressed about the lack of mine, they are now entering relationships with women before I have even had the chance to.  I don’t believe in any type of inherent justice on this earth but I can’t help but feel a burning bitterness when I’m around these happy couples.  After all those years of being treated differently because I didn’t pass as a typical feminine straight girl, the girls who passed as typical feminine straight girls are enjoying the same sex relationships without the magnitude of scars that I endured for being this way from the start.  I want to be happy for them because they are my friends and sexuality is fluid and who knows what types of internalized homophobia they have battled in their lifetime.  But I remember being called names like it was yesterday and the way it felt like my school and my friends were complicit in it.  I reassured a friend last summer, after her boyfriend broke up with her, that she would find someone else and I knew that was true.  In the back of my mind, I also knew she would find someone again before I could even get a first date with anyone. I was right.  Even during her breakup, the thought of providing comfort for her overrode the sadness I felt because no one provides that type of comfort to me when I deal with the same issues of rejection and being alone without any of the temporary perks of dating or being in a relationship.  I tried to provide the same comfort a few months ago when she broke up with a different guy.  But right now, seeing her in the honeymoon phase of a sapphic relationship she just fell into.  It’s crushing me. I can’t even be around them because I am so lonely it hurts to see things come so easily to my friends and wonder once again whether I will ever be able to experience that type of feeling. I don’t want to be a bad friend.  But I can’t smile through it again.  I just want things to be better for me and I can’t work any harder at that than I am.  Progress doesn’t just feel slow.  It feels non-existent right now.