I am thinking about what it means to write myself as I am. To tell all the bits I’m most afraid of, the parts of me that you may find embarrassing, shameful, annoying, entitled, selfish. Sometimes I am those things.
Twelve years ago, I left my first marriage. Not long after, I dropped my daughter off with my folks and went with an old high school friend to a wedding where I knew no one but her. As we were leaving the reception, we ran into one of her old coworkers in the street, and then we were all at the bar just down the block from my college apartment, squished into a booth with the coworker, my friend, and my friend’s not-so-little-anymore little brother and his buddies. I can’t remember what I drank, but I remember soaking up his attention. I remember his hand on my thigh under the table. I can’t remember if he kissed me in the booth or if we waited until we were outside. I didn’t necessarily want to sleep with him, though I might have, had his sister not insisted we get in the car and go home. I just wanted to be kissed. I wanted someone to want me, to whisper in my ear, I always had a crush on you.
Nothing came of that night. We never talked again. I didn’t need anything more than to be pushed against the cool brick of the building, the fabric of my sheer blue dress catching on the rough edges, to be kissed good and hard by someone who thought my post-baby, divorce-era, eat-my-feelings curves were every bit as hot as my 100-pound high school frame. While my 19-month-old slept soundly in my sister’s old bedroom at my parents’ house, thirty minutes away, I let myself be a twenty-six-year-old woman just for a few hours. I got to wear that beautiful blue dress that made my eyes sparkle and let a dashing man’s hands rove all over my body. To this day, that night remains one of my favorite nights of my life. I think it always will be. And it is hard to say out loud because what kind of mother . . .
Not long after, I slept with the coworker guy from the same night. We were each other’s companions, we’d say. He didn’t really want a relationship, and I didn’t want anything serious, though I did want him to treat me with respect, and he didn’t, not always, and I didn’t know to walk away. I didn’t yet know how I was wired from childhood to seek connections where there weren’t connections. The more someone pushed me away, the more I tried to earn their affection. But more than anything, I clung to him because I was desperate for sex, desperate to be crushed by intimacy. No one had wanted me since I was twenty-three. I wanted to want, and I wanted to be wanted.
And I think about these two men, these two men who were the last in a long line of men that came in and out of my life from the time I pulled a Laney Boggs and got contacts at fifteen. I think about how tender and fierce that makeout session with Guy #1 was against the bricks or how good the sex was with Guy #2. I came out the following summer, and I felt I had to pack away all of the good sex and good kisses I shared with men because I’m definitely (definitely) gay. Gold Star Lesbians never shared those moments with men, so if I liked it and enjoyed it, I’m probably not a real lesbian. And some of the men in my past were so bold to ask — because we teach men to believe their dicks are the only way to pleasure a woman — how I could be gay if I enjoyed fucking them so very much.
I’ve had good sex and not good sex, and sex I didn’t want, and sex I said no to, but sex forced on me anyway. And the good sex was good sex. It was the kind of sex that made me weak and wobbly-kneed. Sex that was worth crying out over. I was lucky to have (some) men who cared about my pleasure, who thought I was beautiful and funny and interesting. But there’s good sex, and then there’s the kind you hope other people get to have someday because this sex is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, and my god, is this what it’s supposed to be? Yes, yes, this is what it’s supposed to be. And then there’s also all of the other things beyond sex and attraction, though it’s those too. Coming out was like coming home.
Writing this, I can imagine what a reader might be thinking. I’ve created this inspirational-handmade-homemaker aura because those things are also true about me, but I am also all of these other things. I post photos of my house that folks have likened to a Pinterest dreamscape when they step inside for the first time, the soup I made into art on Sunday night, and just enough about my trauma to remind you I’m as human as you are. I don’t write about sex or the nuance of queerness, at least not like this. If I write like this, I will step out of the inspirational, mythological, almost-not-a-real-human box and into a wide-open and untamed space where I can be who I have been and who I am now. Where I can be silly and queer and fiercely feminist, and I can write about how I once pretended to be demure and Christian and said too many bigoted things before I knew better. I have been a thousand different people and will be a thousand more. Here, I can write about what it was like to be twenty-six and sixty-five pounds heavier than I’d ever been, raising a baby all by myself, desperate to be twenty-six for a moment. To be someone whose prefrontal cortex had just finished developing a year before. To be young and free. To remember what it felt like to be touched like that.
I don’t want to forget those men, those kisses, the quick, silent sex I had on the couch while a hockey game blared on the television, and my daughter slept soundly in her bedroom at the other end of the apartment. I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen or that I wasn’t a woman who needed what they gave. I don’t want to act like I somehow have my act together now, as if I didn’t then, as if my desire was wrong or embarrassing. As if my need to be engulfed by red-hot flames was selfish or shameful when it was anything but. As if somehow, because I’m gay, I cannot express that those men were just what I needed at the exact moments I needed them. And dare I say it — letting myself come undone with those men led me closer to myself.
I am thinking about what it means to write myself as I am. To tell all the bits I’m most afraid of, the parts of me that you may find embarrassing, shameful, annoying, entitled, selfish. Sometimes I am those things.
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This is amazing and so powerful in its honesty. It is so true that we have so many aspects of ourselves and I think that none of us can fit in a box should be celebrated. Thank you for sharing 🤍
Thank you! I’m a bisexual woman who married way too early, divorced, remarried later. I feel so “seen” in giving weight and not brushing away those pretty much purely sexual encounters I had, not relationships, but so much what I needed at that time if my life. 💗