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June 29, 2018

Dear Catherine

By CatherinePublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Dear Catherine,

Today is June 29, 2018. It's been a little bit since I wrote one of these letters. I honestly kind of forgot about them. But I wanted to get back into writing these because they help me think through things a little bit better. I still haven’t come out of the closet, but I think I'm getting close. It's just really hard because I'm not even sure what I am. Am I gay or am I bisexual? I'm so confused. I've never had a relationship before and this whole thing is so new and kind of scary to me. Sometimes I see guys and I feel drawn to them, but not attracted. I don’t know if that’s because I feel drawn to human connection and I just want friends. But I feel attracted in more than just friendly ways to girls.

I think it's taken me a long time to get there because I wasn’t feeling like I had the right personality or style or even background. I would see so many stories of people coming out and think that my experience has been totally different from theirs. And that is true because I did have a completely different experience than them. I never had a relationship when I was younger. I always had crushes on guys, but looking back now, I don’t think I ever really liked them? I just felt like I needed to have a crush to be normal when so many other things in my life seemed so crazy and abnormal. And honestly, I didn’t know any better. I have a gay uncle, who I didn’t realize was gay until he got married to the guy we called our uncle, too. It just never seemed weird or anything to me. And there was a kid in my class who was gay, but he always got made fun of and being gay was like weird and not cool, and I was in middle school, so I didn’t know any better. One of my friends had a lesbian mom, but it was different. It just didn’t seem socially acceptable to be gay, especially as a girl.

One thing I do notice looking back are subtle things that would have clued me into the fact that I wasn’t really straight had I known as much about these things as I do now. I've hung out with this girl I know a couple times. Just as friends. And she is bi. I almost thought about coming out to her, but I changed my mind for two reasons. One, I'm not totally sure she would keep it a secret. I don’t know her all that well, but she does know my family, and I'm not taking any chances. And, two, she always comments about how gay she is, which isn’t bad for any reason, but then she’ll say I can’t do or say certain things because I'm straight? Like, for pride month I had my Twitter name have a pride flag at the end, and my cover photo was also a pride flag. Then, she changed her cover photo to a pride flag because she hadn’t yet even though pride month was like halfway over. Well, the picture she chose was the same one I had, and I pointed that out to her. She was like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I can change it." And I said, "That was fine, it was just a picture of a pride flag." Then, she came back saying, "And besides I'm actually gay so I can have it up longer than just pride month," and laughed. And I get that I'm not out of the closet, so there is no way she would have known, but it was just the way she said it that was so polarizing and offending. Like, I get that she thinks I'm straight and therefore, in her eyes, not a part of the LGBT+ community, but even that just rubs me the wrong way. Like, can people not see how damaging it is to closeted people to say or do things like that? Things like this can force people out of the closet earlier than they are ready for or push them back in for longer than they should be. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to get across here, so this is all for now.

Sincerely,

Me

lgbtq
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About the Creator

Catherine

I am a 20-year-old college student who deals with depression and anxiety and uses writing and poetry to understand it better. This is my raw feelings put into words, and this is me.

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