A shorter life

I have a genetic mutation in my blood. It causes a whole variety of symptoms but the most drastic of those is a shorten life expectancy. As I get older, my blood gets weaker and my organs will one by one start failing until eventually I will die, in pain in a hospital bed at the age of 65.

Most of the time when I mention this I'm joking, because even though its not common for you, I've known this my whole life. Yeah, I'm terrified, I'd be crazy not to be terrified. But 65 is a long way off and I'm only 1/3 of the way through so I've ages to go!
People tend to tell me 'you never know!' Or 'medicine has made some serious advances' or most commonly "shut up, I don't wanna think about that!'. I get it, I do death is scary but when you have your mortality explained to you at 10 by a man is a lab coat holding viles of your blood, you have a sort of blazé attitude towards it.

I will die. So will everyone esle so who cares! Why do I need to pretend like I don't know that? I know step by step what will happen to me. I sit in hospital wards watching it happen to women like me all the time, the weakness then the grey skin, then the kidneys go, then the pancreas, then your bladder and if you make it past those things one day your heart will just stop and every red blood cell in the body will simultaneously explode. I know this will happen to me, so why do I keep getting lectured on smoking and eating right? By the time those things start having any effect on me, I'll be long dead and buried, so by God I'm going to enjoy them while I can!

I've always known how and when I'm going to die, but that's not gonna stop me from living my life right now. So I'm gonna do whatever makes me feel happy, and be thankful that having a shorter life doesn't mean it can't be epic.

Dealing with it

After a 3 year relationship went up in flames there was only one thing I needed to do: deal with it.

The day she dumped me was tough. I sat at the kitchen table of our tiny studio apartment with my college work in my lap and tears streaming down my face. She sat there looking at me apologetically and hoping that I wouldn't crumble into a thousand pieces right there in the kitchen. I wasn't sure if I would or not.

She left me for a guy. Not that she'd ever admit that but everyone knows it to be true. About 2 months previous to this she cheated on me with him and everyday from then on I had to sit in rehearsals and watch them together. Laughing, cuddling and enjoying each others company. They were going away together that summer and pretty much the only thing standing in the way of their happily ever after was me.

Somehow I managed to not only live with her for 3 months after our breakup, but become tollerant of her and slowly that tollerance because fondness and grew back to friendship. Why? Because I dealt with it.
We were forced to put our drama aside and deal with the bigger issues.
While living with her I fell into such a deep state of depression I had to switch myself off. Once the summer came and went though, I learned some life lessons that I will carry with me always.

The most important lesson for me was: people do shitty things, but that doesn't make them shitty people. Even though they both did some awful things to me, I had to keep reminding myself that it only hurts this bad now and some day soon I won't care at all. The thought of them still leaves me seething with anger and feeling like I'm going to explode with tears, but I can deal with it because I thought myself that I don't need to pine or morn over a relationship that made me unhappy.

When I think back to my final year of college all I can see is a black hole of misery. I can't remember ever laughing or enjoying myself. I can't remember ever feeling wanted or loved. I can't remember her ever making me happy just because she wanted to. I remember crying, anxiety attacks, worrying and a whole load of sleepless nights. Why would I ever morn that?! Why would I ever want that back?

People say that when a relationship ends it's best to cut all ties, but personally I think there's a lot to be learned by saying "Its okay that you don't love me anymore, cause I deserve someone who can love me better!" And get on with your life. I dealt with it and now I don't feel like I lost a huge part of my life, she's right there if I need her, but I can move on and forget all the crap that relationship put me through and enjoy the friendship that was there before and was developed during. 

I deserve the Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart definition of love. As long as you know that, you can get through any break up. And in the end, she regrets not treating me right but I have no regrets at all.

"The Gateway Dyke"

I'm a gateway dyke, I always have been and I fear I always will be.

I should probably explain this term to those who are unfamiliar. A gateway dyke is a lesbian who is continuously approached by heterosexual and bicurious girls to experiment with.

Every girl I've dated has started of this way. Something about me makes them feel comfortable about 'experimenting'. It's like because I'm neither feminine nor masculine in my attributes or qualities, it's an easier transition for bicurious girls to test the waters.

While most of the time this doesn't really bother me, there are times when I'm very confused and frustrated because of it.
There always comes a time in every relationship when I have to evaluate the situation. On one hand, I could peruse this girl and hope that she is far enough on the bisexual spectrum to carry out a proper relationship with me. On the other hand, perusing it means growing attached and all too many a time I've been hurt because seeing a girl and dating a girl are to very different things for a hetero. And fundamentally, when it comes down to it, the majority of bicurious and bisexual girls will end up with men, in my experience anyway.

So where does that leave me? Well, I'm cursed to be in string of ambiguous and secretive relationships with girls until at some stage, one is willing to stick around for the long hal.
It's the curse of the gateway dyke, I've just come to accept that.

My super straight girlfriend

"Girlfriend" is a term I use loosely in this situation. "Situation" however is the perfect word.

In the words of Maria, let's start from the very beginning. I met this girl; funny, kind, friendly and pretty. We were pals and didn't really spend 1 on 1 time until we had a night out. There we were, dancing away having a fab time and for some reason my brain went 'fuck it!' And I kissed her. Thankfully, she kissed back.

Since then we've been hanging out, texting all the time, we kiss, we cuddle, we enjoy each others company. Here's the classic catch though: she's straight.
I know what your thinking, 'she's kissing you, so clearly not!' But if you refer to the previous post about being a gateway dyke, that'll all be explained to you there.
Not only is she straight, but she's single too....even after 6 months of seeing me.

Dating a straight girl always comes with its challenges, but this girl takes the cake.
She refuses to acknowledge our relationship in front of anyone else, so when we're around mutual friends or her friends I always seem like some super weird dyke that just lingers around her.
I never know what I can and can't say so to save myself the worry, I just stay as quiet as I possible.
I'm not allowed say that I know her to a huge percentage of the people I work with because she also works with them.
And the biggest of all, she is adamant to stay single and will mention she is single at the drop of a hat if she gets the chance, despite dating me.

I don't know what it is about me that makes girls think that it's okay to treat me as if I'm expendable or unimportant. Not that she's trying to hurt my feelings but she acts as if I have none. We joke a lot about me not being a boy and I usually laugh but every now and then I feel like she means it. Like if I was a boy, she would want all of me, not just the part that she can cuddle into at night.

I know she doesn't mean to hurt my feelings. She does care and obviously doesn't want any drama or ill will, but you can't help but let old insecurities creep back in. I keep my feelings and problems out of our time together and avoid any conversation that would lead to me having to explain myself to her.

I find myself having to withhold things from her because I'm terrified to let her in. Doing that would mean being vulnerable, a state that I don't allow many to see me in. It's her rule that we're not a couple, and those conversations are couple conversations. I can't really tell her about my day or how I am all the time because that's inner circle knowledge and letting her in there would end in disaster.....or so everyone thinks.

The overwhelming advice from everyone has been to walk away. "Shes using you" "she's confused" "she just wants to experiment" "she's just lonely" are lines I get all the time, but they don't know her like I do. She doesn't hold their hands like she does mine, or rub their neck when it's soar, or send long 3 minute voice recordings of nonesense to them like she does me. They don't see what it's like to be alone with her, when she's not pretending for anyone else or trying to hide anything, when she's calm, at ease and with me.
So I stick around in the blind unlikely hope that she'll realize she likes me as much as I like her and all those challenges will melt away.

Blind and unlikely being the optimal words.

The only gay in the village

I adore my friends! As individuals they are amazing, kind, funny and always willing to give advice. The problem is that they are all heterosexual, there's not another queer in sight.

Now, don't get me wrong, the sexual orientation of people shouldn't make or break friendships but whether we like it or not, there are inherent differences in how the LGBTQ community experiences the world. My sexuality doesn't define me, but it does impact on who I am and how I think. My hetero friends sometimes find it difficult to understand were I'm coming from and this can feel really lonely.

There are conversations about love, relationships, sex and girls that I don't get to have. When I meet someone and we start dating or I'm going through a bad breakup there's no one I can turn to. Although my friends really do try they just can't understand because they've never had the 'I'm Straight Again' argument or been dumped because of their gender.
When my ex and I were separating my friends couldn't understand why I was so upset I had been left for a guy, they just didn't see the big deal because they've never had those insecurities that come with same sex relationships.

There are vulnerabilities and insecurities that come from being gay and when you feel like people don't understand those insecurities it's very frustrating. The differences in our sexuality can be so isolating. All too often I find myself surrounded by my hetero female friends and although I'm engaged in the conversation there are large portions of it I can't take part in. Our relationships are different, how we meet people is different and our sex lives couldn't be further apart and although I will always find the love and support I need, the understanding of why I need it isn't there.

Allies are great and I wouldn't change my friends for anything but a little bit of queer in the mix would really help the situation. Someone who can just get why I don't kiss drunk girls in clubs or whether I'm texting a girl or "texting" a girl. It would be nice to have a conversation about my love life without having to explain the reasons I feel this and the reasons I did that, it's tedious and frustrating and makes me feel really alone. I would really appreciate not just being the token gay of the group, the big spoon to the sleepy girls or the pretend girlfriend when they're getting perstered on a night out.

I would love to have someone I could go to pride with and actually take part in the event. Someone who will go to the gay theatre festival with me and I can discuss the importance of RuPaul with. Someone I could talk to who understands that being gay is hard, harder then the hetero community know, harder then we can even explain because it's the internal struggles that are tough. Fighting those battles completely on my own or with ill informed soldiers takes its toll. Sometimes the isolation is overwhelming but I just remind myself there's more people to meet and friends to be made, so statistically I'm bound to meet a fellow queer at some stage!

So if you are lucky enough to have both queer and hetero friends, count yourself lucky, because you've got the best of both worlds and know, I envy you greatly!