Pride

There is more fear than I can even begin to describe. It’s a fear of the unknown. A fear of admitting, finally, who I am and what I want from life. A fear that everything up to this moment has been a huge lie. A fear that my parents won’t approve, that my friends will disown me, that my work will be affected. Fear that I might still not be good enough, that I might not like who I am, even when I’m being honest with myself.

The fears are largely irrational. Some are not. When one friend (I use the term loosely) found out about my previous relationship with a woman, she told me it was disgusting. When another friend found out, she told me that she’d thought it would have been her and I getting together, and our friendship group disintegrated in a tangle of jealousy. A good friend and I used to spend time together outside of work until she inevitably stopped talking to me, which was a shame as I loved her company. There were odd messages in which I said that I only ever attracted weirdos and she said that she didn’t consider herself a weirdo. They were messages I didn’t understand and I couldn’t even begin to pick apart the subtext, if there even was one. Are we no longer friends because she thought I’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick, or because she might have felt more for me than she thought she should have, or because I am actually just a crappy friend and she got bored?

The other fear is that once my female-only circle of friends, my tribe, find out that I am attracted to women they will assume that I am attracted to them. I thought this was a complete fabrication that my nasty little mind decided to torture me with, until a friend actually did this. I told her I was attracted to women, and she then came up with her own tale of lesbian woe (she’s married to a man and, I’m pretty sure, not a lesbian) and proceeded to tell me she was attracted to me and she assumed I felt the same. There had been no cues or signals from me to her to suggest this. I am the single worst person at flirting or reading hidden meanings in body language or texts. I am useless. Her declarations and then her cutting me off when I didn’t reciprocate left me feeling betrayed and confused.

The thing with coming out is, I find it a bit cringey. Women who are attracted to men don’t feel the need to declare that they are indeed attracted to men, so why the bloody hell should I have to declare my intentions? Why is it a revelation? When I was a teenager I used to watch the sitcom Ellen and I would agonise as she agonised, I felt her awkwardness as she was set up on and went on a series of disastrous dates with men, my heart beat wildly in my chest as she prepared to tell her parents, I cried with her when she came out, I experienced that jolt of joy when she made a connection with a woman that she’d never felt before, I felt her liberation and then I hid. I hid from who I thought I was and what I thought I might have wanted, and the juxtaposition of what I thought society wanted for me and what I thought I wanted screamed in my head. I still feel as though I can’t say it out loud, but here it is nonetheless: I’m gay (autocorrect just tried to change that to Gary, which made me chuckle).

When I was younger, I constructed a persona for myself. I became a great wingwoman for the blokes I lived with at uni the first time round. We went out, I drank pints, I picked out the beautiful women for them to chase, I kissed more than my fair share of drunk men and that was it. I didn’t ever want to have sex with them, the thought made me want to throw up on myself. I was terrified of it and I hid. I hid behind alcohol and dancing, by being the last person standing at parties. I was never the one to slope away or go back to anyone else’s for the night. I have absolutely no idea how many men I have kissed in my life, the toll is ridiculous. By that point, I still hadn’t had sex with a single one of them, I couldn’t get past the point of kissing. I didn’t want to do anything more.

One day it all changed. Someone who should have been a friend took the decision away from me. I no longer had the choice about who I was going to have sex with and whether it was going to be with a man or a woman. When I was trying to figure out who the hell I was, he forced my hand. He made me do something I didn’t want to do, and it was with someone I didn’t want to do it with. He left me feeling dirty and tainted. I scrubbed my body, I’d have bleached my insides if I could have. At a point in my life when I should have been exploring, understanding, searching for myself, he stole something so fundamental that I can never get it back. He stole my choice, my body, my uterus, my sense of identity, my opportunity to take my time and figure it out for myself. I hated my body for being so fucking fertile, I hated that no matter how much damage I tried to do to myself, that life clung on.

Then I moved away for a year as part of my degree and spent nine months trying to block out the guilt and the anxiety. The worst had already happened, so fuck it, I’d show him by having sex with any man that would have me. The ultimate revenge, or the ultimate self-harm. I occasionally drank to obliterate the guilt, the fear, the hurt, the loss. My body was a stupid vessel that had wanted to hold life tight within it, a life that I hadn’t chosen or wanted. A life that threatened to end my life.

When I moved back, I met the most handsome man and we started dating. This was someone I cared about, he was kind and considerate. And I freaked out when he wanted to have sex with me. Not a wobble, an actual panic attack that resulted in me throwing him out of the house in the middle of the night. Funnily enough, he didn’t come back. I moved away after graduation and once again began a cycle of having sex with anyone. Friends of friends, an armed policeman, a bar owner, a man broken by his own grief of losing his wife and children, a man I thought I loved and then left behind. A string of misery and loneliness.

At the risk of over sharing, sex wasn’t enjoyed. It was endured. Something they enjoyed that left me feeling vulnerable and hollow. I felt bereft. Nothing ever felt right, and I thought that I was weird, devoid of any emotion or feeling. For years I put it down to the one who stole that part of me. Even when I got married, the sex was perfunctory. It was neither good nor bad; it wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. I felt like I was getting it wrong and that I shouldn’t be there. It was traumatic and I switched my mind and body off so that I was largely absent from it. Sex was middle of the night, middle of the road, lights out, in bed. Sex made little impact, except that he used it as a power play. He could withhold sex if he wanted, and that was him punishing me because I thought that sex meant love. It didn’t.

Then I met a woman who wanted to have sex with me and the world changed. I didn’t need to be drunk to want to be near her. Sex became middle of the day, early morning, lights on, wherever it happened. It was exciting and it immediately felt right. There was no embarrassment or switching my mind off. Sex was enjoyment and equal and liberating. It was normal to be with a woman because it felt right. I was present. It was new and should have terrified me, but I felt at ease. It all fit. Everything became clear: my teenage crush on Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds; my love of Moira Stewart’s gravelly voice; my admiration of Emma Thomson that borders on obsessional; my belief that Sandy Toksvig needs to invite me to dinner to impart wisdom upon me; my watching The Great British Bake-off because Sue Perkins was on it; my tuning into the horse racing on TV because Clare Balding was commentating.

All that has led me to the conclusion that I am a lesbian, I’m gay, I’m a woman attracted to women, it’s just that I’ve been in denial for the past twenty years. I’ve always known it, and it’s always scared me. A shift in identity is a lot to take on board, and it’s not just being gay, it’s also being separated, being a single mum, being a midwife. My life has shifted beyond belief in the past five years, and it feels as though the floor shifts beneath me every time my identity shifts.

Coming out isn’t about making anyone else’s life easier, it’s about living the life that I should be living, it’s being honest with myself about who I am. Telling people is confirming that I know who I am, it’s saying that this is me and that’s ok. It’s a culmination of years, decades even, of thinking and procrastinating. It’s worrying about how I will get on in a female-dominated workplace, and then realising that I don’t actually care because being a lesbian means being attracted to women, some women, not all women. It’s part of my identity, but it’s not my only identity, it’s not the only thing to define me, it’s a collection of what I am, it’s bigger than and not as big as the rest of me. It’s part of me and it is beyond me. It’s a part of me that I’ve come to accept, and it’s a part of me that I am having to embrace. It’s telling people who have a problem with it to kindly exit my life, and asking the friend who walked away for no apparent reason why I wasn’t enough. It’s sobbing hysterically when watching Philip Schofield declare on national television that he is gay, admiring his bravery, being ashamed at my own cowardice, and hoping that I don’t leave it another twenty years to be honest with myself about who I am. I don’t want to waste that time cloaked in a shroud of guilt and shame and regret while life passes me by.

Coming out is about the friends who have supported me from the beginning, who love me unconditionally and haven’t batted an eyelid when I’ve said “I’m attracted to women”. It’s acknowledging that these fierce women have sat and listened to me bang on about whether or not I might be gay (I suggest you’ve not read this closely enough if you’re still in any doubt). It’s being sorry that there are people I’ve still not told, for no apparent reason apart from me cringing at the thought of having to say “I’m gay” not because being a lesbian makes me cringe, but because any admission that I may have had or may want to have sex makes me cringe. When I had to tell my mum I was pregnant with my children, I only did it because she wanted to book tickets for a concert six months in the future and I’d have been at home with two small babies so couldn’t go. Cringe. I’d admitted that I’d had sex. Coming out isn’t about gaining validation from people I may or may not know through Twitter, it’s not about making a statement, as I actually don’t think that me being gay is particularly interesting.

Coming out is about the endless conversations with the poor life guru who has a knowing smile and a reassuring “to me, you’re just you”, which sums it up perfectly. I am just me, with varying degrees of confusion about who I may or may not be. I am grateful for the people who accept me for who I am, and I’d be grateful if those of you who don’t accept me extricated yourselves from my life (and I’d also be grateful if you kept this from my Nan for just a little bit longer, I’m not sure she could cope with learning that both Philip Schofield and I are gay in the same week). I’m infinitely grateful for the life guru whose friendship will never change and who I know will be there to grill the first woman I’m dating and dare to introduce her to, she will be a formidable match with her exacting standards and her endless desire to see that I’m safe and happy. Ultimately, coming out is about just that, it’s about maximising my own happiness.