I’ve been told (by an former and mostly-beloved psychologist of mine) that interactions with other people form a mirror that reflect identity back onto you. You don’t realize that you’re smart, or funny, or attractive (or stupid, or dull, or ugly) in a vacuum; people react to you as though you are those things, and, thus, you work out who you are.
At the risk of turning this into Tip’s Issues With Hir Family, my family was never really very into reacting to me; I was born maybe four years before my mother started going through menopause and my father lost his job, so by and large it was all about them. I think, too, that my ‘rents were very reluctant to shove me into being or doing anything I didn’t want to be or do (aging hippies, dontcha know), so I got very little feedback about my beliefs or choices.
I’ve gathered a few things from interacting with people, about myself:
1) I am smarter and more articulate than average,
2) …
Okay, never mind. I suppose I haven’t. (I was going to include “reasonably conventionally attractive”, but I had at least one very recent roommate who believed I was the ugliest thing this side of uglysville and desperately wanted to doll me up pretty and femme, so there you go.)
What I’m driving at is that I have a comically frail sense of identity. Which is not a good thing to be in general (it leads to some pretty psychologically ugly places, both independent of people and with regard to relationships), and when one believes that one’s a member of a disenfranchised minority (oh, say, queer), it can lead to under- or overcompensation.
With this in mind: could my family and select friends please stop trying to convince me that I’m not queer? Especially when it’s patently obvious that they have ulterior motives?
My parents are notoriously bad offenders. They want me to be Happy In The Sex I’m Born In. This, to be fair, is not that unheard of–my parents want me to be happy as I am, and I can respect that. But is assuring me, tersely, that “being a girl is nice because you can wear skirts and makeup” really necessary? Or my mother’s assurance that my desire to slice off my breasts with some kinda slicey thing is bad, because “nipples are fun”? Mine aren’t fun; they’re just kinda there…
Or, you know, my mother’s (horrifying–she’s 64 years old) assurance that “penises can be fun”.
Ahem:
Mom: they are not fun for me.
They literally make me cry when I see them.
Even when I wasn’t fucked up with PTSD I didn’t really see/feel the appeal.
It is very nice that you enjoy them, and it is very nice that you can describe in great detail all the physiological things they can do to stimulate me, but trust me when I say that I’ve had way more cock inside of me than I should have at this point, and should just give up trying. I know that you want me to lead a happy, sex-positive, pleasurable life, but encouraging me to go through more loveless tearful relationships (while you and dad smugly tell yourselves that I must be straight–look at all these loveless tearful relationships with men I’ve been in!) is not a constructive activity. I’m aware that you want me to decide that having a dick inside me is awesome, so I can crank out children. It wouldn’t happen even if I liked penis; I have the next 4-12 years of my life stuck in academia, and am not interested in raising tiny pink squalling things. So deal with it.
And male friends: please stop telling me that I “must be straight”. It’s really just pretty obvious you want into my pants, so shut the fuck up, because it’s not very sporting to fuck with my head when I’ve got identity and trauma issues like you wouldn’t believe. (Especially you, guy-I-had-a-threesome-with-because-I-had-a-crush-on-your-girlfriend. Your insistence that “I have to be bi, because a gynophile would never even consider having sex with a man” is hilariously ignorant if not downright offensive, even discounting the threesome.)
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