I’m going to put this in the world, on the off chance it helps someone. The predominate fictional narrative around queerness is that it’s something you’ve just ALWAYS known. (And then obviously, in movies and TV you die, but that’s a different post). I didn’t always know. I didn’t pine for my all-girls school classmates, or imagine kissing them when I was 16. It just wasn’t like that for me. What I did feel was that I was broken. That I didn’t fit. That I didn’t like boys as much as I should (outside of celebrity ones). I just felt like a bad straight girl. That’s what queerness felt like to me until I was 33 years old.
For 33 years I felt like I was broken.
Then I came to this fandom and started being exposed to a language to talk about things. To other folks who were putting words to what I was feeling. To a discussion of heternormativity and queerness and signaling.
I realized I wasn’t straight in 2015. I divorced my husband and called myself pan in 2016. In 2017 I realized I was actually a lesbian. And when I got there, it felt like my identity clicked in to place. At 35, I didn’t feel broken anymore.
All of that to say, the journey isn’t linear. And it doesn’t have to look like the movies to be true.
