I recently re-downloaded Spotify, after not having used it for many years, and listening to my “favourites” playlist, I heard one of the songs that I used to cry to as a teenager driving home from school. This triggered a number of other memories and, after a sleepless night piecing everything together, I came to the conclusion that a lot of my unexplained teenage emotions came from being queer and having no idea that I was.
I feel like we often hear stories of people growing up knowing that they are queer and having to hide it during school, but we don’t often hear the high school experiences of those of us who were somehow unaware of it, but aware that we were different. So here is one of those stories.
Back to the Spotify playlist: the songs that I used to cry to were almost always about not fitting in anywhere, not being able to let anyone in, and being undesirable. And this was how I felt growing up. I spent a huge part of my life as a teenager trying to figure out why I didn’t fit in with the mainstream, why I was always considered the weirdo, why no guy ever had a crush on me and honestly vice versa; and I spent hours wondering what was so different about me that I couldn’t fit in, even when I tried really hard.
Whilst I’m sure many teenagers relate to what I’m saying, the reality is that, for me, it was probably true. I was different from the norm in many ways: style, interests, political opinions, and relationship status.
I never kissed anyone in secondary school, and the only crushes I had were on the people who vaguely noticed me; but I wasn’t all that interested. I just figured that all the boys at my school were gross and that I was too much of a weirdo to be interested in them. This all caused whispers and speculations about me: “she’s a lesbian… so frigid… so weird… so horrible”. Turns out now that a bunch of those things are true (though hopefully I’m not horrible!), but at the time, although I did mull them over, I didn’t feel like they were true. Yet the whispers cemented it into me that I was the weirdo, that no one would ever be into me, that I didn’t fit in.
Now when I look back, I realise that I fundamentally didn’t understand the whole “puberty” experience that everyone else was going through. I couldn’t play the same game as them – and because I didn’t know it at the time, I was just very confused about what was so wrong with me. I used to really identify with this image on a t-shirt that I once saw. It was a little picture of a very spikey cactus holding a sign that says “hug me” on it. I so desperately wanted affection and to feel like I was a normal girl.
Yet I never really did any of the traditional “girl things”. All the way through secondary school I refused to hug my girl friends, which was the girls way to greet each other, because it felt awkward. I didn’t know where to put my hands, but I wanted to be a hugger, I just didn’t really know how – except with my male friends outside of school, where it was suddenly very easy.
I didn’t wear make up, I refused to listen to pop music (except secretly at home), claimed I hated mainstream fashion and really did the “I’m not like other girls” thing. It felt like it was the ultimate betrayal every time one of my friends started wearing make-up, doing their hair nicely, batting their eyelashes at the guys and flirting, because then they would start doing and caring about things that I just really didn’t, like the hot band members of a certain band etc. And then I would feel like the outlier again, because I could not relate at all, and yet everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing, reading from a rule book that I didn’t have access to.
Overwhelmingly, whilst I pretended to be okay with being the weirdo and I really made being different my identity, I spent so much time feeling like I didn’t belong, like I wasn’t in the right place, and worrying that maybe I never would be, that I felt strangely isolated all the time.
Interestingly enough, the only exception to this feeling, came in my last year of secondary school when I took an extra AS level class with people in the year below and made friends with whom I didn’t feel like a weirdo. It turns out now that some of them were also queer – I’m going to make an educated guess that this feeling of belonging was not a coincidence.
Looking back, I find it hard to believe that I didn’t realise that I was queer far, far earlier – all the clues were there, and it seems like most other people had clocked it about me – even my mother asked me and reassured me it was fine! But that, as I have said before, is the power of compulsive heterosexuality: the assumption that we are all straight. I wonder how much higher my self-esteem would have been, had I not had to spend years second guessing why I didn’t fit in.
I do feel sad for teenage Kat, who felt so lost and unsure of herself, who felt so undesirable and so different but didn’t yet know why she didn’t fit in. Maybe if I’d known I was queer, I could have found comfort in that, rather than just feeling like something was wrong with me. But instead, it wasn’t until university that I finally fully got rid of the feeling of not fitting in and of being a weirdo, when I made a friendship group filled with people who were all as weird as me. And yep, you’ve guessed it, they are almost all queer in some way or another! And since knowing that I too am queer, so many things in my past have made so much more sense, and I have begun to feel the sense of belonging that I have always wanted.
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