12:08am July 18, 2013

What I mean about confusing sexuality categories, part 2.

If you want to know the specifics of my childhood sexuality patterns that made me so confused about my orientation, see my last post, part 1.

The reason things were so confusing was almost as if my sexuality was taking place in two parallel worlds.

In one world, I grew up being told I was straight and going through the motions of straightness. Society and my family both encouraged me to see my behavior and emotions in terms of liking boys. When I watched The Wonder Years on TV, it was because my family did. But my mom would show me magazine articles about the boy who starred, I literally can’t remember his name.

When I talked to boys, she’d say how much she talked to my dad rhythm she first met him. Never did that when I talked to girls, even if I was attracted or even involved with them. As an adult, after I firmly came out as a lesbian, she still said these things. When a close male friend wanted me to officiate at his wedding, I was nothing but overjoyed he’d met someone he loved. My mom however asked me if his marrying was okay with me or whether I was jealous. I said of course not, I’m not even straight. She told me that didn’t always matter. It was like despite knowing I was a lesbian, she still had heterosexual expectations of me that her mind could not let go .

It felt like my society and family had created a set of guide rails for heterosexuality. One wheel on each track, I couldn’t get off and couldn’t even imagine that things were not what they appeared.

Dance with boys. Date Karl. Maybe get engaged to someone in my teens. It was all planned out.

That feeling that I didn’t love Karl didn’t change things but I think it was the start of the end. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was the first time my conscious awareness strayed from the guide rails.

Then there was a presentation on LGBT issues at my school. I didn’t realize it at that time, but it planted a seed.

Meanwhile of course, my true feelings had never been in the guide rails. I had romantic and sexual feelings and fantasies about girls without ever leaning the word for it. My feelings about girls were spontaneous. They weren’t created by the combined pressures of circumstance and guide rails. And as I later discovered, merely holding hands or snuggling with a girl I was attracted to felt like the whole world was spinning through me. A feeling I never had with Karl, even though I had plain sexual arousal. Doing the simplest thing with a girl made my entire world spin in delight and love, in a way even orgasm with a boy simply didn’t do. The orders of magnitude here are impossible to even compare. It was like anything with girls involved my whole self and everything around me and them and everything around them and just EVERYTHING.

Not that I have tons of experience. Autism limits that, even for presumed-women, who tend to have more experience than presumed-men. But you don’t need that much experience to notice a massive difference. You don’t even need any. Most straight people know they’re straight long before they kiss anyone let alone have sex.

But it felt like my life had two separate paths sexually. There was what society wanted, and what I wanted. But at the time, I couldn’t tell the difference very well.

So at some point around then, I thought I was bi. That would explain dating Karl and liking girls, skill at once. And for many years I didn’t question that at all. I liked it also because I could think of myself as logical and unbiased.

I know some bi people might wince, and I know why. Bi people have to fight a stereotype that bi people are just confused or closeted gay people. Which isn’t true. Real bi people are bi.

But some lesbians mistakenly think we are bi. Some bi people mistakenly think we are lesbian. It happens.

One mess I got into for being open about thinking I was bi, was a psychologist who was messed up. He got into the field for the power and control. He would ask me to describe fantasies about female patients at the residential facility I lived in. He egged me on. I remember reluctantly agreeing that this one girl was attractive. And he actually tried to go on about how wonderfully “exotic looking" she was. Yeah I forgot to add he was also racist. And that a grown man was asking a teenager about their fantasies about other teenagers, and joining in like that… it really turns my stomach. But he was always a piece of work.

Then when I was nineteen, and living on my own, I began really taking a hard look at myself. I wanted to know which things were guide rails, and which things were me. And buy just in the area of sexuality. I did a lot of hard work figuring myself out. I was away from outside influences, nobody was telling me who I was, I was almost entire out of the psych system, no longer on meds that messed up my awareness of the world.

But actually evaluating my sexuality was ridiculously easy compared to other things. I took a piece of paper and folded it in half. I wrote the guys it been attracted to on one side, girls on the other.

I was generous with the guys section. I included stuff that was mostly aesthetic and attraction that today I’d see as mostly guide rails.

I came up with maybe four guys, only one of whom I’d now view as even close to legit .

The girls side, on the other hand, was full. Not just every line, but every line used three times over.

It seemed obvious now that I was only attracted to girls. And the best word I knew for that was lesbian.

But the real confirmation came when I said it to someone for the first time. I couldn’t bring myself to say lesbian. Said not straight, not bi. And all hell broke loose.

It was as if the guide rails had planted a time bomb in my head. It felt like an internal explosion. I spent all night fighting back for my right to be myself, feeling shredded to pieces, dreadfully open and exposed.

It got easier.

I told my dad, and he said he already knew. He couldn’t say how. Ten years later I asked him and none of my guesses were correct. He just knew. Before I did. Somehow. He said it wasn’t my behavior towards women or men, it was just me.

So that’s why my sexual orientation was so confusing to me for awhile. There was what was going on inside me sexually, and what the world wanted me to be, and I had a really hard time telling those things apart for awhile, especially given language, cognitive, and social problems enough to make my head spin.

But I can’t even describe how amazing it finally felt to throw out all those expectations. I men initially it felt like I’d just been ripped to shreds. But the violence involved there only made me more determined to be myself. When the only way that a society or person can keep people doing what they want is by physical or psychological violence, that’s a really good reason not to go along with them.

Although caution is definitely advised because with violence goes danger. Physical violence can kill you. Psychological violence can make you kill yourself. Always know the risks and be ready, before you just jump out and defy something like that.

But for me, being who I am has eventually been my only good choice in the end. Risk or no risk.