laynemorgan:waverlyyearp:My whole life has been about being perfect. Perfect grades, perfect job, be
laynemorgan:waverlyyearp:My whole life has been about being perfect. Perfect grades, perfect job, being the perfect sister, taking care of kara…This matters so much to me. it matters so so so so so much. I know we see a lot of queer characters all the time and I know people talk a lot about how sick they are of coming out stories but this this is so real to me. This is the first “coming out” queer experience that I’ve ever looked at and saw myself in completely. I spent my life never liking dating. I dated boys in college that I loved. That were nice, nice guys. I slept with them and had first kisses and romantic dates and went to prom and at a certain point in all of those relationships I became heartbrokenly frustrated with my inability to “get it.” I’d watch girls on movies and TV, see other girls I was friends with who were so desperately in love with the men they were dating, were so consumed by their desire to impress boys or talk to them. I thought, at first, that maybe I was just too above that level of frivolousness, that somehow I experienced romantic and intimate feelings at some evolved capacity (self important, I know). I spent years and years trying to explain to my mom what I meant when I said that I just didn’t get it. That I didn’t “care.” I just must “not like sex.” I just must not have met the right guys to be in love with. That slowly turned into maybe I just don’t know how to love people. Maybe I’m not capable of love. Maybe I’ve turned off all my emotion entirely because of the trauma I experienced in my young adult life. I mean this was a real thing that sat in the back of my mind until this very year. It just never made sense to me. It never added up. I always thought maybe everyone in the rest of the world was lying when they described how magical and perfect and wonderful love was. Or maybe I was just too fucked up to get it. I went back and forth from blaming society to blaming my own stupid emotions. This continued even past my own coming out process. As many of you all may know, I came out later in my life, only a couple of years ago and this year I experienced two huge parts of that. The first was that I had sex with a woman for the first time. And for the first time, more importantly than that, I enjoyed sex. Not just the getting off but the whole experience, the girl, the kissing, the moment, the next morning – all of it. I thought about it for days and I thought about her when I listened to the radio and it was real. The second was that I went on a date with a girl. This was also my first time ever doing this. We did that real thing that I thought was a lie when I saw it on TV. We went on a date that I really wasn’t sure whether or not it was a date. I walked her to her door, panicked until I kissed her and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to kiss someone. Here I am, at 25 years old and I feel all over again like I was supposed to feel at 16, giddy and nervous and clammy and excited. All those years of just wondering what it was that I didn’t understand about love and the real answer was just that love, as the main stream media and society and my general perception of the world presented it didn’t understand me. It wasn’t for me. Because it wasn’t with a girl. And on those two separate instances, with those two different women, I had the realization and the moment that I see here in Alex where you suddenly go “oh… that’s what I was missing.” The entire world made so much more sense. I no longer felt imperfect or lost or like I’d be miserable and bored forever. TV and movies often present coming out as a young adult experience and I think that’s what fucked me over. At 18 and 19 and 20 and 21 and 22 if I still just didn’t enjoy the men I was dating maybe something was wrong. Because I for sure wasn’t gay. There was no way. If I was gay I would have experienced those flashing lights already. I would have known it, wouldn’t I? No. Coming out can be an adult experience. It can be a process that doesn’t come into our lives until later and often times, not having come out or discovered that about ourselves lulls us into becoming comfortable with that unhappiness and discontent. And I know I’m rambling but I’m just so happy to see this. I’m so glad (despite my love for bi representation and that I’ll still appreciate it if she is bi) that Alex is likely gay. That she realizes the reason it never felt real or right for her was because it just never was. Coming out stories don’t get old for me and I hope we continue to tell them but expand the ways in which we do. I hope coming out stories become more varied so that we don’t continue to perpetuate the image that there is a perfect coming out story or that we’ll all know who we are and understand that confusion at a young age. Coming out as an adult who always had other stuff on their plate and blamed their detachment and loneliness on themselves is so real to me. I just love this so much. I appreciate it so much. This is one of the very first queer storylines I’ve ever looked at and said “that’s exactly what I felt” and “that character’s like me.” And it’s really fucking cool. It’s really important. -- source link