The first time you ever heard it mentioned you were eight years old. You were on a compulsory field trip to your state capital and were standing in line to view something or the other and your classmate turned to you. 

“Do you know what a democrat is?” 

You and your friend look at each other and back at the inquisitive classmate. You shake your heads in unison. Suddenly, he goes silent. He leans in close and drops his voice.

“They’re people who think boys can marry boys and girls can marry girls!”

You’re confused. The possibility had never crossed your mind. Romance had always  been defined in your mind as between man and woman. Words like husband were followed by wife, father followed by mother. Putting husband and husband or wife and wife together was never an option until now. You didn’t find yourself minding this new viewpoint, but your friend looks disgusted and so you follow suit. 

“Ew!,” you squeal together, shaking your heads back and forth like it could expel the thought from your brains and onto the pristine floor. 

Time passes and suddenly you’re in fifth grade. You now know boys who like boys are gay and girls who like girls are lesbians. You don’t think much about these people. It doesn’t affect your life in any way. That is until your best friend opens a conversation at recess. 

“I think I like boys, Lauren.”

Oh. 

See, your best friend is a boy. And at the age of ten you just assumed you would fall in love and get married. It seemed inevitable. You were an avid reader and that’s what happened in books. Boys who were friends with girls got married to them. This revelation had shaken up your half formed vision for the rest of your life, but you couldn’t find it within yourself to care. You grow to realize you like your friend better when you aren’t imagining a future where you have to live together indefinitely. 

So your best friend is gay and the world doesn’t stop. You’re still you and he’s still him and that’s that. A year passes and you’re in middle school. You and your friends are on track for greatness and the future looks bright. Except for that one storm cloud that blocks up the sun in your brain. Sexuality. Ever since the intricacies of sexuality had been explained to you silent moments in the dead of night become consumed with one thought, could you like girls? It seemed impossible. You brushed these thoughts aside with dismissive rebutes.

“You just want attention.”

“You just want to be different.”

“You just can’t.”

Other girls could like girls, but you just couldn’t. You got used to seeing yourself in a certain way, put yourself in a certain dynamic. You were the supportive, straight best friend who rooted your gay friends on from the sidelines. Of course, you know as well as anybody no straight girl spends that much time wondering if she’s gay. You came to accept you harbored an attraction to the same sex. You also knew you didn’t want to give up your attraction to men. And so a new term was introduced to your life. Bisexual. 

You grow comfortable with this label and what it brings. You can speak freely about your sexuality without feeling the need to hide. This acceptance unlocks something in you, and you find yourself latching on to it and not wanting to let go. You feel pride, joy, and most of all love for your identity, but you also feel wrong. Your supposed attraction to men feels heavy, like a weight dragging behind you. You can’t imagine any future with a man but you can’t help but feel like you need to. Liking men was safe, a net you could fall back on to if you found yourself in less than accepting company. Being a lesbian ment you were giving up any chance you had at normalcy. Normal relationship, normal marriage, normal life. 

You fight this battle within yourself for weeks. You shake your head and try to spill the thoughts on to the floor, not for the first time in your life. You can’t let go. For the first time in your life you let the word enter your mind. Lesbian. You are a lesbian. This is unlike anything you’ve ever realized about yourself. This isn’t a tweak, or a subtle change to your life, this is a new door opening for you. 

In the beginning, it feels weird to say it. You can’t say it with the causality you used to be able to be able to say bisexual with. You see the difference in how people react. 

“Yeah, I’m bi.” is met with smiles and inquiries.

“I’m lesbian,” is met with judgmental looks, probing questions, and odd coments.

You shy away from the word. You sugar coat your identity to make it palatable. You tell yourself you’re confident, but you know you aren’t. This insecurity makes you angry. Angry at yourself, angry at the world. Why is the word lesbian so hard to handle?  Why can’t you take pride in who you are? Suddenly, you want to scream it from the rooftops. You want to kick and yell and throw things as you spread your message. L E S B I A N. Lesbian. Not a bad word, not a joke, just a fact. You are a lesbian, and for the first time in your life you don’t want to deny it.