How I realised I was a lesbian at 25

WARNING: this deals with some very traumatic things including rape and is in general kind of sad, but it has a happy ending :)

The first girl I loved had blonde braids and owned the most flawless pair of white platform shoes. We were 9 years old. We were friends for a while even though she was so much more popular than me. I realised I liked her way more than she liked me, but I accepted every bit of friendship I could get with great gratitude. We did a friendship test in a magazine, and it said that we were just starting to become really close and that we should probably have a sleepover to get to know each other better. I prayed we would, but it never happened.
 

I did jazz dance when I was 10 or 11, a haven of just girls, beautiful girls in brightly coloured leggings and legwarmers. I would look forward to Tuesdays the entire week, to spending an hour in the studio surrounded by gorgeous, precious ladies. Girls looks at each other, check out each other’s outfits, compare themselves to others, read each other’s body language. None of this raises any suspicion, it is a fact of life. 

All the girls in my class thought Ginger Spice was a slut, so I said my favourite Spice Girl was Baby. But oh Geri how I adored you, your tight pvc two-piece and thigh high red boots in the video for Say You’ll Be There, the little bit of underwear showing under your Union Jack dress... But everyone loved the Spice Girls, everyone thought they were pretty, right? 

I didn’t understand what I was feeling, so I told everybody I had a crush on a boy in my class, until I started to believe it myself. He was preppy, only wore Nike t-shirts and played hockey. He was so popular he never talked to me, never noticed I existed. I befriended another boy with whom I built tree houses and caught frogs, and when he told me he was in love with me I felt betrayed and scared, it just hadn’t occurred to me.

I made friends with a very strange girl when I was 12, my last year of primary school. She would stay at our house for a couple of days when her mum went on business trips, and we slept in the same bed even though I’d put the blow-up bed up on the floor. She talked about sex constantly, sex with men. We both liked Five, she described in detail what she would do with her favourite member J. I liked Rich, who had long hair and a delicate face, and who everyone said was gay. ‘He wears lipgloss in this picture, ‘ my friend had said, ‘I don’t understand how you don’t find him repulsive. ’ I had to pretend I was J, while she pretended to be Rich, laying on top of each other and stroking each other’s backs.

I read a magazine for young teenagers called Break Out, it had a feature with readers’ questions about sex. A girl my age sent in a letter explaining that she had been turned on when she looked at a picture of a naked woman, and that she thought she had a crush on her best friend. Was she a lesbian? The magazine answered that of course she wasn’t, a lesbian was someone who exclusively falls in love with women. Finding girls attractive didn’t mean anything, who doesn’t love boobs? She had nothing to worry about. 

I had my first kiss when I was 13, with a boy I met at my guitar lessons. He played the bass, and had a blue streak in his blond hair that he did by himself with a highlighter. He was funny and cool, I didn’t dislike it. I had been bullied into such insecurity in primary school that I didn’t think anyone would ever want to kiss me, so I wasn’t going to be critical. It lasted for a good eight weeks. Ironically, he was by far the nicest boyfriend I would ever have.

I had a friend in highschool whom I adored. We held hands during break, she was my sole obsession for a few months. Once, when we sat on the floor in the kitchen talking and laughing, I thought she might kiss me. But it never happened. She lost interest in me and found a new best friend, and I wrote a song in a very bad English about how I couldn’t stand losing her. I was heartbroken for weeks, my mum tried to find out what happened, and I told her about how I was losing my friend, and she asked me if I was in love with her. I said I wasn’t, of course, but a seed had been planted.

I got a boyfriend when I was 14. He was 18. I hated him, I was repulsed by him. The way he looked, everything he said, the way his disgusting hands touched me in places I did not want to be touched, not yet, not by him. I hated myself so much it never occurred to me that I deserved to be happy. This was what I’d have to live with, it wasn’t as if I’d get another chance. The age difference was somewhat controversial, but, many adults assured me, girls just grow up way faster than boys. I had a curvy figure with double D breasts and I wore fishnets, eyeliner and a shaggy black faux-fur coat, how could I not be ready to fuck? It was one of the darkest times of my life. After wasting an entire year that I should have spent being a carefree teenager letting myself be abused by this waste of space I somehow found the sense to break up with him. 

There was a new girl in school. She had long red hair and wore lots of green, and everybody wanted to be her friend. Somehow I lucked out and was picked to sit next to her in class for the entire semester. I think it was the first time I realised I had a crush on a girl, but I remembered the magazine. Having a crush on a girl doesn’t have to mean anything. Thinking about running my hands through her gorgeous hair, gently stroking her face, imagining what her milky white skin would look like under her green top, none of that meant anything. 

A friend told me she had kissed a girl on a night out in our local alternative club, a heaven for underage drinking and debauchery. She said that it was really fun. She had a boyfriend, but he didn’t care, he thought it was sexy. I thought about her and the other girl, sitting on one of the sofas in the back, kissing and touching each other’s faces. 

I got a new boyfriend soon. Not nearly as bad as the previous one, and I actually thought I was in love for a while. We stayed together for over 2 years, I was happy for the first year. I don’t think he ever took me seriously as a human being, but by this point I was so disconnected from who I was and what I wanted that I never even noticed. I can’t imagine it now, but I buried everything that made me me under a thick layer of pretending to be the kind of girl that would go with a guy like him. He broke up with me, and I was heartbroken.

A few months later, one of his best friends sexually assaulted me. No in fact screw that, he raped me. I am ready to call it what it was now. I can’t bear to write down the details, but this in combination with how 99% of the people I considered friends reacted to it has scarred me forever and seven years later I am still recovering from it. On the long term, it reinforced my already existing belief that I was not in control. I could not choose my fate, it would happen to me, it would be disgusting, and I’d have to lie back and take it and then be blamed for it afterwards. 

It did get a little better soon. My next great love was The Darkness. Now that I was 17 and on my own I could finally discover what it was that I liked and wanted, and it was glitter, rock ‘n roll, and making bags. I decided not to go to university and instead have a gap year in which I delivered post, made a million bags in the shape of fish that I sold on the internet, and spent every other free minute on the Darkness forum. Pathetic as it sounds, at this point in my life it was the happiest I’d ever been. 

I won’t pretend I wasn’t in love with Dan Hawkins, the beautiful effeminate long haired guitarist of the band, I was in fact obsessed with him. Because he was completely unattainable, I could imagine everything exactly the way I wanted it to be, and just leave out all the things I disliked about relationships and sex. Which was nearly everything. Feeling pressured, being in pain, feeling embarrassed and alienated, none of that existed in the safe castle in the sky I had built around Dan Hawkins. But what was far more important to me was that, starting with The Darkness, I could begin to discover things that I actually liked. Music that I wanted to listen to, clothes that I wanted to wear, countries that I wanted to travel to. And they were, respectively, T.rex, a black velvet jacket, and England. 

I felt like I was taking a break from real life, and tried to push out the thought it was inevitably going to get worse.

What made it easier was that I had decided I did not like relationships, and would be on my own from now on. I could have crushes on different people, make friends all over the world, go on trips abroad on my own to see my favourite band, kiss a beautiful stranger and then go home by myself. People thought I would change my mind, but for years I didn’t, and why would I? The concept of a happy relationship was something entirely foreign to me. 

During this relatively carefree period of my life I finally kissed my first girl. She was just a friend, I was never in love, but we spent many nights together, just kissing and spooning each other. I felt safe and happy, appreciated and loved, feelings I never had and never would have with a guy. 

In the next few years I kissed every girl I could get my hands on, all of my female friends and every female Darkness fan I got drunk with. Carefully I started to identify as bisexual, only to myself.

I went to study fashion, it was miserable. I had a crush on my teacher, a beautiful slightly older woman who with long blonde hair and nicely tailored black clothes. I quit after a year and a half, the internships were hell and the teacher had left.

I fell in love with a girl from the Darkness fandom. She was perfect to me, a female Dan Hawkins, long dark blonde curls and a leather jacket. I treasured every moment I got to spend with her, they were few and far between because she lived in another country. We went to a party with a band, and kissed while we sat on the singer’s lap, before each kissing him in turn. Of course I bragged about kissing someone semi-famous, but that kiss with her meant so much more.

I told a friend of my mum’s about her, and she said ‘it’s a shame you’re not lesbians, it sounds like you really get on with each other.’ The penny dropped a tiny bit further.

Sometimes I would tell random people I met that I was a lesbian. I just wanted to try on the identity, to see if it would fit. 

When I went to university I met several lesbians, and silly as it may sound I would think ‘I wish I could be one of them, but oh well, I guess I have to be with guys too.’ I think the root of the problem was I still didn’t feel like I was in control of my life, like I could make decisions about what was going to happen. Life happened to me, and I watched from a distance as I did things I did not enjoy, with people I did not like, and then bragged about it afterwards to seem normal. Then I would kiss a female friend at a party and it would feel so so much more right, but I still didn’t get it.

The saddest thing I’ve had to realise about myself is that for over two decades, I just did not think I deserved to be happy. I wasn’t miserable, the first two years of studying English and living in Amsterdam were at that point some of the happiest years of my life and I made friends that I adored. But it felt temporary, I felt my inevitable future unhappiness looming over me.

I went to live in Southampton for a year, it was impossible not to treat this as a fresh new start. In my first week in the UK I found a flyer for the university’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender society, announcing an introductory pub crawl. It was weeks away, but I wrote the date in my diary. I needed to make friends in this new town, and they might as well be gay.

And so I walked across campus into Portswood with a group of people I didn’t know, chatting to anyone that seemed a little lost. In the third pub we went to, I turned around and saw a girl with black hair and a partly shaved head. I complimented her on her bright blue eyeshadow. It was October 10, 2012. Now, 9 months later, she is the most important person in my life. I never knew it was possible for two people to go together so perfectly, that a relationship can feel so right and good, that I could love somebody so, so much. To say that I never felt this way before seems like an understatement, I never had a single feeling that was even in the same category. I truly did not know what love was before I met her. I experience everything differently, knowing that she exists and that she loves me. I finally completely understand one of my favourite quotes by Oscar Wilde: ‘The world has changed because you are made of ivory and gold, the curves of your lips rewrite history.’ Nothing could ever be the same after she came into my life. 

It seems like it would not matter if I were bisexual or gay now that I had found someone I wanted to be with exclusively, but it was such an important realisation for me that what I had been looking for was the love between two women. Sometimes I realise I will never have to be with a man ever again, and it makes me incredibly happy. Finally finding the identity that fits me has been an immensely liberating experience.

Leaving Southampton was one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to do, I had known that day would come from the start but that did not make it any easier. I have cried nearly every day for the last three weeks because it really feels like I have left an actual physical part of me in Southampton, but I count the days until I can pick her up from the airport and spend two amazing weeks together, and I count the months until I will drive to England, throw all of her belongings in my car and take her home with me, forever. 

Maybe I am still not completely in control, but now that she has happened to me, I can deal with anything. 

I love you Cat Moran.