I used to think that because I grew up in a “progressive area”, because my first girlfriend and I got away with fucking in the highschool bathroom, because my family was fairly cool about it… that I was y’ know… okay?

But like I remember being 12 and trying so hard to have crushes on boys because I wanted so badly to be normal… because the other kids used gay as an insult, because I wanted to be able to be friends with the other girls my age without that hot tight miserable knot of longing and dishonesty in my stomach, because I was a fat kid who dressed weird and liked weird things and said weird things and wanted desperately to be liked and why couldn’t this one fucking thing be normal?  Why did everything about me have to mean being alone?

And I remember looking at the lesbian couple who were school administrators at that hippy dippy little school and thinking “but I’m not like them either” because I wasn’t, not wholesome or outdoorsy enough, not hale and hearty and pink cheeked.

I hated nature at that age. I’m not the type to go hiking.  

And I remember fantasizing about what it’d be like to be one of the boys that one of the girls I had a crush on liked and I remember the acute pain of knowing that I didn’t fit.

and I remember being older and feeling like I couldn’t even get being gay right.  And I remember liking boys, but hating the way I was supposed to relate to them.  I’ve never liked the way men are supposed to treat women, even the nice parts.  I remember never feeling like I was right or enough or whatever with women.  

I was too girly in the wrong ways and too loud and too strange and too difficult.