I’ve known fear as a primary function of my life for more years than I can note. I have heard a lot recently that 30 is when you “begin to get comfortable in your own skin”. I had no idea what that might mean. I am just beginning to learn. Fear. For so long I have been fighting the notion that I might be afraid of what other people think of me. I hate… HATE the idea that what other people think of me influences my actions, my behavior. I have spent years resisting that idea. I know now that what I feared most all along had nothing to do with other people. I didn’t know if I could be okay with myself. That is another question entirely. I didn’t know (although I thought it intuitively) that what others think has more to do with them than it does to do with me. I didn’t know that I could interpret what was said to me more as a function of what they feel about themselves than it is a function of what they feel about me. Now I know. Now I know that when someone says, “Maybe someday you’ll find the right guy”, what they mean is “Maybe someday you’ll see the world as I see it, and be afraid of the same things that I’m afraid of”. I now know that there are some things that I will never fear… or more accurately that I will never fear again.
I cannot be held responsible for the way I felt prior to my own memory. Some of my earliest memories are of crushes on women. That cannot be a result of social influence. I guarantee that I had not been “influenced” toward being a lesbian prior to kindergarten. And I had no idea, at the time, that my biggest and most consuming emotions would be seen, by some, as a social ill. That’s how I was born. My mom said, the other night, that had she been born 200 years earlier, she would have been burned at the steak because she is left-handed. How stupid does that sound today? She imagines that, someday, sexual preference will be seen as a simple function being; a trait inherent to some beings that others do not possess. And how will these “persecutors” feel when they realize they had been vehemently criticizing something that no one can control?
