Why I Wrote The Woman Who Tried To Be Normal

When I was 16 or 17, I knew with certainty there was something terribly wrong with me.

I had never crushed on a guy in all my years of life, not even a pop star guy, yet somehow I was always crushing on older women, even pop star women.

This was the early 2000s when nobody in my country was talking about homosexuality so, being young and green in life, I was a little confused. I didn’t know anything about lesbianism other than what I saw from the five lesbians I knew from school and two of them were butch and three of them liked only butches so I was pretty convinced I wasn’t a lesbian. How could I be when I wasn’t attracted to butches or wanting to be butch, right?

I didn’t know what I was but I knew I was going to have to find a man to marry and get divorced from anyway just so nobody would know how weird I really was. It was more socially acceptable to be a divorcee than it was to be a lesbian in those days, obviously.

The group of girls I hung with then were boy-crazy so to fit in with them, I would pick out random boys from school who seemed to look like the type of boys most girls would like and pretend I had the hots for them. I ended up dating some and kissing some and going out with some just like everybody else. In the meantime, I kept my real crushes hidden deep in the bellows of my feet like dirty little secrets I wouldn’t have admitted to even if you waterboarded me.

Then, out of nowhere, while waiting to go into college, while working as a waiter in a club because I was desperate to meet people who weren’t as rule-abiding as the ones I’d grown up around, I met an older girl, who looked just like a girl, who behaved like a girl, who was also openly lesbian and had only just broken up with a girl who was about the same type of girl I was.

With her, I learned I was indeed a lesbian and she introduced me to a whole underground community of lesbians I didn’t think could exist when really, it had been there the whole time. It was all very exciting for about a year, until one day, I brought her home, hung with her in my bedroom for a few hours, sent her to the door, waved her goodbye, and got accosted by my dad on the way back to my bedroom.

In short, he did not approve. He got vulgar, hissed the L-word like it were a personality fault, told me how perverse, sick and abnormal I was, warned me never to see her again or do anything like it again, and threatened hell while simultaneously putting me through it.

Shortly after, I broke up with the older girl and for the next few years I went back to dating men, hoping, just hoping, that if I spent more time doing it, and if I tried everything it entailed then maybe, just maybe, it’d grow on me and I would one day find a man I’d actually want to marry.

Did I?

No.

What happened next was I lost interest in life. I became chronically bored and disinterested in everything because everything seemed so retarded and boring and meaningless. I lost interest in school and work and the thought of having to dress up and go sit in various public places with whichever guy I happened to be dating at that time was just… such… a… chore. I didn’t actually mind the romantic bits because I was hoping they would activate some part of me that, perhaps, I needed to activate to properly understand what all the fuss about men was? But the hanging out for hours part and having to talk to them part was just… so… so… ugghhh. I soon lost interest in pretending to be interested in men, lost interest in that marriage and divorce I’d been so bent on getting, and I lost all interest in leaving the house, or even showering, or changing clothes, or combing hair or talking to people or doing anything much at all. I didn’t get the point of anything and I was so ready, extremely eager, to just die and get life over and done with.

It’s 2018 now so obviously, I didn’t kill myself. I found a way out of that bleak state, somehow (you can read how here if you want), but years on, I am still full of regret and shame.

What about? Having done all those perverse, sick and abnormal things with that older girl?

No.

What I’m truly ashamed of now that I’m older and (I would like to think) wiser are all the things I did with men while trying to fix what I thought was spoilt within myself.

The problem is, if you don’t really like any man but need to have a man for the sake of having a man, then you can accept any man and do whatever (and most men will accept any woman for short periods of time for whatever). It may feel like the sensible thing to be doing at that point but, trust me, years on, when you finally discover love and realise what real love is actually like, you will look back at all those moments you shared with people you didn’t love, some of whom likely didn’t really love you either, and you will cringe and blush and wish you had a time machine and a history eraser and you will regret all the time you wasted lying to yourself and everybody else, and you will wish those darned authority figures saw past their own narrow-minded view of the world before preaching and coercing you into doing something for their own benefit, at your expense.

And what has this long sob story of mine got to do with The Woman Who Tried To Be Normal?

You will have to read it to find out but for the benefit of the lesbians born after me, here’s what I’ve learned so far—If you are attracted to women and have never been attracted to men at all, dating men, spending a hell lot of time around men, trying to fit in with girls who like men, trying to behave like girls who like men, will never change that about you. Finding that secret underground community closest to you, on the other hand, will make you feel a hell lot better about yourself.