being an emotionally unavailable hopeless romantic 22 year old lesbian who's never been in a relationship
i'm a crazy hopeless romantic about everything except my own life. people usually tell me that i'm stone cold, rational, maybe a bit hotheaded but very grounded nonetheless. it always confuses me because even though that has always been the image i wanted to curate for myself ever since i was a teenager, it's in a great big fat conflict with how i feel on the inside. i don't know why i was so obsessed with being seen smart, knowledgable and all the rest. must be because nobody paid me any attention otherwise so i had to compensate. anyways, it hurts me. i pushed this rough image so hard in my formative years that it became reality. i know personality is fluid and there isn't one single "real you"; surely this is a part of me too, but i feel like it's overstaying its welcome and it's been really hard to break it. i feel so vulnerable if i'm romantic or emotional or what have you in any shape or form. so self conscious, so judged. can't speak about what i feel, about love, about the uncomfortable stuff, with anyone. i'm almost like a very toxic emotionally unavailable guy.
speaking of being a guy, i feel as though another reason for this facade of mine that i built in my adolescence is partly related with misogyny, internalized and otherwise. as many teenage girls can relate, it's very hard being taken seriously when you're a girl. very hard as in no one does it! i think i started to suppress my characteristics that are considered traditionally feminine so that i could be accepted into the cool boys club. of course that was all in vain, it was never going to work, because it doesn't matter to the cool boys unless you came out of a womb with dick and balls. i'm sure a lot of women can relate to that weird envious feeling you have of men. you hate them, you hate the way they behave, the way they lack any kind of respect and yet at the end of the day, it would be nice to be perceived as a full human being.
i realized i was queer around 16 or 17. i'm saying queer and not lesbian because at the time i thought i was bisexual. i'm still not very sure, because as i'll be mentioning in a bit, i'm lacking some experience in the romance department. but it's very likely that i am one. i had troubles in my sexual and romantic developments because one, the facade part, two, i felt undesirable my whole life and struggled with my body image a lot, three, i was literally scared of genitals of all kind and lastly, my sexuality was always complicating things, i never knew what i was. so, when everyone was out there having their first loves and exciting experiences i was locked in my room tormenting myself and it worked. i made myself believe something like that could never happen to me. i stopped trying. correction, i was never actually trying in the first place.
there was one boy in high school who, i'm only NOW realizing, had a crush on me. i recently found a poem he wrote to me while cleaning some stuff. i didn't even know i had kept it. it was quite a romantic one. i must've been stupid to not have realized that he had a crush on me. in fact, i was stupid. or maybe, as i've said, just a lesbian. so there i have a solid proof that i am in fact lovable. but to be fair the same boy also bullied and bothered me a lot. so i was getting mixed signals. i already had extremely low self-esteem, bullying me was never going work you fucking idiot! and it left some damage on me so, fuck you, boy. i also had a girl who had a crush on me in my senior year of high school. this time i knew, because she blew up my phone with drunk texts on a school night. she was a close friend of mine. as i've said, i had conditioned myself to not feel or show feelings in any scenario whatsoever and that nobody could like me so, i friend-zoned her gently without even giving it a thought. i freaked out. i felt like throwing up. we don't really talk anymore. so i blew that. not just my chance of possibly experiencing something worthy but a good friendship.
well, all of this to say, it's hard for me out there. i don't live somewhere where you can casually come out and date girls with ease anyways. but it's getting harder and harder to contain this deep yearning for connection, sincerity and love in me. i'm in dire need of experiencing and expressing something human. sadness, codependency, jealousy, abandonment, love, happiness, joy, anything. i spend my days thinking of grand, tragic, toxic romance stories where someone ends up dead and everyone ends up miserable. then i come back to reality and realize i'm unfortunately still me. all of this other stuff going on in my life, but nothing fills the empty space i carved in myself.