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.
