Finally Arrived: My First Year Out

It’s been a little over a year since I came out of the closet. It’s been a year of heartbreak and moving. There was change and reevaluation. Most of the time, I felt like I was adrift at sea. In the midst of that, I started this blog with the promise that I’d put out one post a month. For the most part, I succeeded. I have a tiny following and a couple of articles that have popped off. I wrote what I thought spoke to me at any given time during the month and it ranged from comphet to Jefferey Dahmer.

During September, I was wracking my brain to figure out what to write about for my first writer’s anniversary. I thought I needed to have something well-thought-out and meaningful in order for it to matter. However, upon further examination, I thought…maybe I should just write about what I’ve seen and noticed over the past year of being out.

So here they are.

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It is easier to date women. Granted, I didn’t walk into dating women thinking that heartbreak and betrayal wouldn’t be possible, but my god it is easier. The calculus of trying to be a “good girl” is gone. I don’t have to worry about the fact I may look too girly, or have hobbies that scare men away. I can be seen for me.

I converse much easier with women and can communicate what I want and need with women. Sure, the rejection stings, but it feels more honest now. I feel like I approach women a lot easier romantically as well (granted, I need to know that they’re queer first).

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I can dress how I want to now. I had always wanted to present more feminine and eclectic but felt like I couldn’t because it’d scare men off. Now, there’s no limit on how I want to look. I have a couple of Selkie dresses and a Tyler McGillivary dress I’ve been having my eyes on for a while. I can dress on a theme, and wear colorful eyeliner without it being a statement of what type of woman I am for men. Speaking of…

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There is even more pressure to make statements on queerness. I want to talk about queerness, but since I’m already black and female there’s this pressure to be an activist when it comes to every part of my life. I don’t really want it. I want to have a break from always having to prove my humanity to other people. I’ll take a stand on things when needed, but I don’t want my whole platform to be about that.

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I have more mental space for other projects and work in my life. My creativity has skyrocketed over the past year. When I came out, I wanted to write more, draw more, and make more work. There was a struggle to try and make any work that was palatable. Knowing that my sexual orientation will inherently make my work unpalatable to people (even more so with all these books bans going around) has made me much more relaxed. I can focus on making work that is fun to make and not just marketable.

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Being a lesbian can be lonely and isolating at times. There are consistent reminders from a society that heterosexuality is the norm. It also can be isolating because a lot of discussion among other women is about men and our relationships with men. Having a life without men is a foreign concept to a lot of people. We make up around 2% of the population and most major cities don’t even have lesbian bars or lesbian hangout spots for folks who don’t drink for whatever reason.

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I don’t need sex as often, but when I do I want it to be longer. Before I needed a full “session” three days a week. These days, it’s more like a couple of times a month, but like three sessions in one night. My “O”s feel more intense these days as well. The same thing goes for my sexual attraction as well. When it’s present, it’s a lot stronger, but it’s not present often.

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I am so much gentler on myself mentally and emotionally. I don’t feel like I’m piecing together my sexuality anymore. There’s a path and a landscape, but there are new things popping up on the horizon (like I didn’t know how attracted I could be to female weightlifters). And with that landscape being finally built I can finally start to unpack some things I really need to. For instance…

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A lot of my feed is very white and very thin for the majority of this year. I excused it from the beginning because I was just coming out and wanted to explore my new identity. But now, I want to see more diverse bodies on my feed. In the past few months, I made more of an effort to seek out more people of color, and different body types that I find to be attracted to.

Being attracted to just thin, white (or white-adjacent) gets boring after a while, and I am a whole Black woman. I need to be better about this. When I dated men, I didn’t follow them at all, but my taste was pretty diverse. Time to do the same with women.

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On the subject of hard conversations, I’m having more real conversations with my mother about my future partners and who I like, and her view on keeping me safe. I’m getting better with expressing my needs overall, rather than keeping them under wraps until I explode. There’s an essay in me about how respectability politics & classism has impacted my dating life, but that’s another essay for another time.

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Finally, my voice matters. Apparently, people read my writing and even want it to be published in a magazine. I became a “professional” writer after a year of posting on this blog. Yes, there were rejection letters and people who didn’t see my work on their sites, but there’s finally been some success in that department. I am officially an “emerging writer” as it’s called and it feels great.

Here’s to another year. Another year of writing, insights, pop culture analysis, and simping over really hot girls.