Ah, What Fools We Mortals Be

I'll probably never write a post this long ever again, and I apologize in advance for the length, but I'm not going to try to cut this one down any further because all of it is relevant to understanding how I turned into me, Athena, as I am now. It's my love history, or lack thereof - things that happened, things that could have happened, things that should have happened, things that definitely should not have happened. (All names have been changed to protect innocent love objects!)

A lot of details about my life started falling into place on November 18th, 2006, when Aphrodite and I spent our first five delicious hours kissing on her bedroom carpet. Things I never understood or let myself think deeply about finally started becoming clear. Aphrodite, who was engaged to a man during her undergraduate studies, has said many times since then that, starting around age 12, she knew she was far more attracted to women than to men. Talking to her, I slowly began to realize - like a spreading sunrise - that I had always felt exactly the same way! I just didn’t define it as such... or wouldn't let myself define it as such. But the way my eyes would skim over girls (as they never did with guys), the wistful envy of the way someone looked, the admiration of a particular curve or feature... I always thought it was lingering adolescent insecurity about my own body, something every girl goes through, and that I was just a late bloomer when it came to guys - but I finally began to realize that every girl doesn't go through that. At least, not to that degree or for that long. I feel like I spent most of my adolescence crouched down in a corner, eyes squeezed shut, hands tight over my ears, rocking back and forth, whispering to myself, "I hope I'm not... I hope I'm not... I hope I'm not..." But if you have to hope not to be, well, that should make things pretty obvious, right? I was surprised and somewhat irritated to find that I'd been hiding this fact from myself for so long. It was a startling realization, like discovering an extra limb I didn't know existed, one that I wish I could have been exercising.

I never had crushes on boys when I was young - ever. I never planned my wedding day, like so many little girls do. I never wanted to wear dresses or pink things. I quit dance class after one season. I always kept my hair short. With my friends, we made clubhouses and played tag and rode bikes and climbed trees - never played House or School or Baby. In middle and high school, I threw myself into horseback riding, basketball and Ultimate Frisbee, while my female friends shied away from any activity at which they might break a sweat. When my high school friend Stacie casually said she could easily see herself married, but couldn't see herself with kids, I was thunderstruck. I realized, instantly and ashamedly, that I was the polar opposite. I had wanted kids for most of my life, ever since I started babysitting my cousin when I was eleven - but I could not visualize a man that I could love 'enough' to have him be the other half of those future kids. I could typify him - tall, broad shoulders, nice smile, intelligent, athletic, easygoing, preferably Dutch-speaking - but his face remained in shadow.

I never really thought any of it meant anything. I did question, at times, whether or not I might be a lesbian - but I hated that word, always have (and still do even now), and felt a sense of relief when I was 19 and fell in love with Danny, or thought I did. I was finally able to convince myself that I had been straight all along, that I had not gone through anything other girls didn't go through, that I was perfectly normal.

And - hard as it is to recall now - I did love Danny. I admired him, wanted to give him everything, wanted to spend my life with him. But there were little things I couldn’t get past - the smoking, for one, or the bouncing from one job to another. Even stupid things, like the hairy patch on his back or the silly, buck-toothed smile he'd get sometimes in pictures. I would catch myself thinking, "Is that stuff supposed to bother me? I thought 'love was blind' and all that?" But most of time, I was able to block those things out. He loved ME, and he spoke Dutch, and I connected with him better than I ever had with anyone - half the time, I didn’t even have to speak for him to know what I was thinking. That was what I fell in love with - not anything physical. And the long-distance aspect of the relationship didn’t help anything. It's incredibly easy to romanticize someone you don't see for more than a few weeks out of the year - especially when you have years of practice at mentally blocking things out. I fell hard, and I fell even harder when he broke my heart after seven months.

But that's what a first love (or pseudo-love) is for, I think - for the heartbreak that inevitably follows. To teach you about yourself, to test you, to show you exactly how strong you are on your own, when you don't have anyone to prop you up. In the months immediately following Danny, I was 'weighed, measured, and found wanting', and bounced from guy to guy as a result. After I finally came to my senses and dumped Michael, at New Year's of 2005, I had two full years to step back and decide that I didn't like the ridiculous person I had become, and that I would figure out how to be okay again. I poured myself into swimming, made new friends, and became an entity unto myself. It took time, and a lot of emotional turmoil, but I arrived at a point of being okay, really okay, not just putting on an okay face and letting myself be convinced that it was real. I liked myself again, and, thus, I liked being single. If Aphrodite hadn't come along, I might never have revisited the sexuality issue at all (though I'd probably have ended up an old maid). But once we kissed, I couldn't avoid confronting it - and it became more and more obvious to me that something was different about me, and always had been. Exactly where I fall on the homo-to-hetero spectrum still eludes me to some degree (Aphrodite is just slightly closer to the 'completely gay' end of things than I am, we've decided), but once she and I got together, I started remembering a lot of things which made me slap myself in the forehead. I was so blind!

Jillian Dunkirk, 4th grade. She was tall, slender, worldly (she was the one who explained sex to me, when we were ten), friendly, artistic, athletic, well-liked... and I was her best friend to the point of extreme possessiveness. We had handmade friendship bracelets, golden necklaces, secret languages - all of which were initiated by me. I monopolized her, and did my best to drive away anyone else who tried to spend time with her. I tried to keep my possessiveness a secret, but when it became too much, I would occasionally articulate, "It feels like Cassie is trying to steal you away from me," and feel incredibly embarrassed voicing those thoughts out loud. The jealous emotion was a permanent knot of tension in my stomach, but I didn’t know how to stop it. At the time, I was too young to know what I was doing - and looking through the glassy hindsight of young adulthood, I always thought it was just typical childhood jealousy. But how many times over the course of my life have I felt that jealous, that desperate for someone I liked to reciprocate and feel that I, and only I, was their whole world? Many.

Rachel Harris, 8th grade, summer camp counselor. Australian and beautiful, she had long white-blond hair, tanned limbs, blue eyes, a pierced belly button, and enough confidence for three people. I sought her out at every opportunity all summer, watched her constantly, wrote her a special goodbye note, secretly bought all the camp photos that she was in, fantasized about her watching and admiring my horseback riding (I was one of only four highly advanced riders at camp), and couldn’t believe my luck the day I got to ride a jet-ski with her. I drew pictures of her in the margins of my class notes for weeks after camp ended, memorized her address in Australia - even now, I remember that her street was called Dolphin or Ocean or something very fitting - and fantasized about being her pen pal, about going to visit her on the other side of the world. I didn’t know what to think about my obsession. Part of me wanted it to go away, but part of me liked it, too. Yet something told me it was definitely something I shouldn't mention, something other people wouldn’t understand. I never told a single soul.

Shania Twain, 10th grade. I watched a taped concert and felt something change inside me. Afterwards, I ran to my room and played her entire CD - not just the three or four songs I had known previously - and didn't stop for an entire year. I became fixated on her - I wanted to meet her, know her, get inside her life and be the best friend she ever had. It was a powerful obsession, the strongest to date. Part of me knew it was weird and that other people didn't feel this way, and another part of me loved her so much that I threw caution to the winds and plastered my room with her posters, created the most detailed fansite on the web, changed my email addresses to include her name, decorated my school backpack with her photos, and even began to aspire towards being a singer myself (utterly in vain). I grew my hair long (for the first and only time in my life), bought a guitar, and started turning my writing skills toward song lyrics. Everyone in my life knew I was a Shania fan, but I kept the singing and songwriting very private - something about that felt too personal to share.

Juanita Hernandez, my 11th grade Spanish teacher - 29 years old. This was the biggest one. That was the year I poured everything I had into Spanish class. I wanted so desperately to impress her, to be her favorite student, to be her friend. I called it admiration, respect, fondness - never a crush. Like all the others, I never imagined her naked, never (consciously) thought about her physically, except in the sense of 'God, I wish I looked like that - she's perfect.' We had fun together - sang on the bus on the way to the state competition, videotaped performances together, giggled over Google pages of information on random things (botflies?), planned her wedding online - and I remembered everything, without even trying. Absolutely everything that she ever did or said was indelibly ingrained in my memory. At the end of the year, I wrote her a letter which ran, no joke, nine single-spaced typed pages. And I actually gave it to her. I remember thinking I should make it shorter, but being unwilling to cut anything out. I don't dare to reread that letter now because the thought of what it must have said - or, perhaps more importantly, what was in between every line - makes me cringe. I was so obvious - it was so obvious - to everyone but myself. Juanita did come to like me, even love me a little, maybe, but it was never enough. I did become her favorite student - which was what I'd thought I had wanted all along - and yet it still didn't feel like enough. The yearning never went away, even though I didn't know what I was yearning FOR. Sixteen-year-old Athena wouldn't figure that out until six years later, when one very special girl came along and, like a fog lifting, gently showed her who she was.

Annemarie Vandervoort, my Dutch teacher, freshman year of college. Just a few years older than me, she was tall, blond, confident, and a native Dutch speaker. Abandoning Spanish - something I never, ever thought I would do - I poured myself into Dutch, trying to be the best, the most eager, the quickest learner, the hardest worker. I journaled, more than once, about how much I wanted Annemarie to like me, how jealous I felt that another classmate was 'in the running' for her affections, too, and how silly and babyish I felt for feeling jealous. But I never let it show - at least, I tried not to. And she did come to like me - I eventually became the favorite student, just as I had with Juanita, and then, eventually, a friend and confidant as well - and I hung on her every word. For that first college semester, she was my idol. Yet I still thought these girl-crushes were something everyone went through, something other people felt and just didn’t talk about. I was so naive. I see it through new eyes now.

Ricki Durant, my junior year roommate. The most obviously athletic girl I have ever seen - 5'11" and 180 pounds of solid muscle, with wild curly hair and linebacker shoulders atop a size-six waist. I loved that little Olympic tattoo on her shoulder. She was the reason I suddenly got so into swimming. I worked my butt off, and lived to impress her - if not through my skill, then through my dedication. I knew I could never be as good as she was, which (as a perfectionist) was depressing - it was the first time in my life that I wanted to match someone at a physical skill, rather than a mental one like a language, and it is simply impossible for a 20-year-old with an adult body, no matter how hard she works, to match someone with seventeen years' experience who started intense swimming at age six and had developed and grown into a sport-specific body type. But at the same time, I just wanted to be included in her world, to understand her life, to BE her. I admired everything she did, and all year, all I wanted was for her to like me. She could piss me off like no other, but a smile, secret confidence or quick word of praise from her fell like sacred balm on my ears. She was a massage student, and gave me an hour-long full-body massage during my last week in town. Heavenly. I wrote her a letter at the end of the year in which I admitted that I loved her, though I veiled it carefully in jokes and memories so that it would seem like any good friend could have written it (and I refused to let the letter run longer than a page - I had learned from my Juanita experience!). I recognized the Juanita-feeling, the horrible, panicky, 'oh-my-god-she's-leaving' feeling, but still (still!) didn't realize consciously that it meant something other than friendship.

There were others, too - not just these six. I felt something similar, in varying degrees, for Lily, for Jai, for Shakira, for others whose names and faces have fallen away over the years. But my social naivete kept me blissfully ignorant of myself - I never comprehended exactly how other people felt toward their friends, how they interacted, what they kept hidden. I had no reason to think I wasn't 'normal'. I didn't think about girls naked, or want them sexually - sure, I looked at their bodies and wished I were that thin or that pretty, but the intensity of my crushes always took the form of admiration, adulation, and a desperate desire to become that person's whole world, to be all they saw, all they needed, all they wanted. And though I cannot define why, I always felt that these feelings were something I should hide - maybe because the last thing I wanted was to frighten the object of my affections and make her withdraw from me. Yet, even in the hiding, I always felt like others knew, like they could see right through me and know exactly what I was thinking. God, I hope, I hope, I hope I wasn't that obvious - though I suspect I was, at least in Juanita’s case. If I had been a boy, it would have been transparently obvious; my being a girl may have left (some of) my objects' judgments of my feelings for them at 'cute' or 'sweet' rather than 'creepy'. Here's hoping. I'll never know for sure.