I've been trying to make this post for a couple of weeks now, but the ADHD is stronger than I am most days. Anyway, I just turned 34 on Saturday the 11th, and although I first came out as a lesbian over 3 years ago, it's taken me until now to feel like I can fully own it. I've really been through it during that time, as evidenced by some of my post history, and I've gone back and forth from bi to lesbian to queer to lesbian to queer to...you get the idea.

My main struggle has been that I kept thinking I was falling for this guy friend or that guy friend, and so I thought that meant I had to change my label, and I guess it felt like every time I did that I had to announce it for, like, accountability or something. It was exhausting, and every time it happened again, I still felt in my soul that I wanted to be a lesbian and just couldn't.

But here's the good news. I could, and I am, and I always was. It wasn't that I was falling for men, it was that I wanted the validation I got from being attractive to them, and I confused enjoying being desired for feeling desire myself. Whenever it got too real and they wanted to turn it into an actual thing, I panicked and shut down and became avoidant because I didn't really want them, I just wanted them to want me. Tale as old as time and all that.

The actual point of this post was supposed to be that now, finally, I feel free. I haven't gone through this vicious cycle for over half a year. I never feel the urge to set my dating apps to show me men again, in the desperate hope that maybe someday, somewhere, there will be one I actually want to date. It's lonely out here for a lesbian living in a shitty conservative part of the US, y'all. I've stopped feeling shame about calling myself a lesbian, and I don't care anymore if it decreases my attractiveness to half of the population who I don't want to be with anyway. I'm through with making myself miserable in relationships with men just to prove that I can do it, that I can be "normal."

If I could forgive myself for the ways I've objectified myself for men and allowed them to objectify me in the past, and if I could stop having dreams about dating/marrying/sleeping with them and then panicking about it and trying to break it off with them, that would be awesome, but you know...baby steps. Compulsory heterosexuality is a hell of a drug, and the heteronormativity we're raised with from birth and brainwashed to believe we want can really do a number on some of us.

This is long, but I just want y'all to know that if you're in a similar place to where I was, there's hope. You can get through it, and you can be a lesbian if that's what you want and what you feel you truly are, and you can be happy. You can also cut off toxic friends who claim to love and care about you but who consistently invalidate your identity and tell you that you're attention seeking if you talk about it. And maybe, probably, hopefully, you can even get a woman to swipe right one day and you can fall in love with someone who loves you back. I assume that's a possibility, it's just not one I've personally experienced yet. Fingers crossed that 34 is the year for it.