I Think I Love You: Part 2

I Want To Know You Love Me

It was only a couple months later that I realized I really liked this new girl at my school. But Ariel didn't really like that I also liked guys. She might have been more confused that I was. I had a girlfriend in junior high but that was my attempt to “force” myself to be straight and to cover up the little crush I had on Elijah before we were friends. I did like Lily but not as more than friends. But I liked Ariel more than I had liked Dustin or Elijah. But I screwed it up by being honest about my feelings. I wrote just as many poems about her than my secret crush on my straight best friend. I stuffed some notes into her locker. Because I could. Because that was normal. And I desperately wanted to be normal. But normal is both relative and overrated. For me, liking guys felt more normal. She was the exception. The one I would “go straight for.” I had hoped that Elijah would be my friend again when I told him I liked a girl now, but he burned that bridged with no hope of reconstruction. 

I lost my best friend, my boyfriend cheated on me, and then my dream girl straight up rejected me. So I gave up on relationships and “Snapchatted" back every guy who flashed me a smile and dropped his pants. But all I really wanted was to hear the "I love you’s" even if they were void of love. It's not like I was going to hear it from someone who actually loved me because they had all abandoned me. So eventually I decided that if I was going to keep screwing around, I might as well fuck up my life all the way. Literally. I thought having sex was normal. I thought sex was the ultimate expression of what love should be, and I so desperately wanted love. So I thought I could skip straight to that climax, but it didn't feel normal for me. Even kissing felt wrong like it was against my nature. With a little soul searching and research I figured out that I'm pan-romantic asexual. So now how am I suppose to find someone who's as fucked up as I am who would also be ok with a sexless love life?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm even capable of love. My girlfriend, my best friend, my boyfriend, my dream girl. I don't think I was in love with them as much as I was in love with the idea of being in love. Everyone seems so desperate to find love. It’s what all the books and movies are all about. So I thought it was normal for me to want it too. But it took me fucking up one last time to finally be in a place where I’m ok with not being normal. And I'm really ok if I never find this love everyone else is chasing after.

    
I’m more than ok with being single. I no longer feel the need to measure my happiness with “I love you’s.” In contemplative retrospect, I was happiest when I was with Elijah, my best friend, you know, before he was bigoted. He never said “I love you.” He didn’t have to. I knew he loved me by his actions. I’m not looking for another Dustin who’s just as screwed up as I am. I’m not looking for another Ariel so that I can feel normal. I’m looking for another Elijah, a better Elijah. A true best friend. Someone I trust and love enough to share my every secret. Someone who will never give up on me. Someone I’m willing to fight for. 

Our hormones tell us that we can find love in sex. Our parents tell us that we will find love in marriage and giving them grandchildren. Society tell us that we can find love in romance and relationships. Our friends show us what love really is. I’m a 21-year-old senior in college about to graduate and enter the “real world.” I don’t need to hear “I love you’s” anymore. I need to see it in my friends who will stick by me till the end. It's not the love I always wanted. It’s the love I always needed. 

It's all in the initials - Who Am I? (part 5)

Ok so here is where I’m edging closer to darkness. Now I’m going to preface that I love my family and have actually cleared up this issue, but here are my unfiltered thoughts.

As you may have noticed, my initials are DW. Now I think most of you might remember the PBS show Arthur, and that he had a little sister called DW. Anyways let’s just say that I was around 5 years old. So here’s the traumatic childhood experience. My mom and brother tease me about having the same initials as the girl on the stupid PBS show. I’m a little kid and easily upset and offended. I tell them to stop but they don’t. Little did they know that in that moment I was deeply scarred. I’m trying to be a boy as best as I can even though I’m not as good as it as my older brother. And all I’m hearing is that as hard as I’m trying I’m still like a girl and that’s something to laugh about. Oh and why in this situation am I like a girl? Because my freaking name. You fucking gave me the initials DW. I had no say in the matter. Even linguistically my first name has only one rare female counterpart. So you’re telling me that because this fictional character goes by her initials that makes my initials feminine. That’s just stupid bullying. But wait, here’s the kicker than makes it so much worse. I don’t think they knew I overheard or that I was old enough to understand, but a while back I heard them say how my mom wanted one boy and then one girl. So as the little son who’s pretty damn good at counting, let’s see my brother came first. One boy, check. Then came me, oh fuck, I’m not a girl. Are you saying you want me to be a girl or that you would rather have a girl than me. So I was a mistake? Not like a oops where did that baby come from or a bastard/love child. Nope. They wanted another child, they just didn’t want me because I was the wrong gender. So you can see how that can screw with a five-year-old struggle to be a real boy and the potential (and eventually realized) psychological repercussions those careless but very sharp words were. Maybe the worst part, the part that made it all too real, was that they picked out a name for the her that wasn’t me. Abigail. It made me feel like I killed me twin sister in the womb. Like I killed this Abigail. Except she was never there. It was just me. DW. So for the longest time I resented being called by my initials even when all the guys in high school went through a phase were they called each other by their initials. (So another way I wasn’t able to be one of the guys.)

So let this being a warning, a cautionary tale if you will, that you should be careful what you say to or in front of your child at ages that you think they won’t remember because maybe they won’t but what if they do. And as you can see I took something that might have been small for my parents, but it was freaking the biggest bombshell of my little lifetime. And I think I did an ok job at explaining why I was insulted in being called a girl. It was screwing with my gender identity. It wasn’t this patriarchal dictation that being like a girl is bad thing. Totally a feminist here. And I think I’ll keep saying this, but girls are freaking awesome. And this whole story came back to me recently because this BuzzFeed article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed: 23 Times D.W. Was The Realist Bitch Who Ever Lived And I am now completely proud to be have been compared to this little girl from a PBS show.

How TV Saved Me: Tune in to find out (part 1)

I always felt different. Too different. I had so many secrets but no one to share them with. No one I trusted. I don’t think I knew more than a hundred people until I left for NYC. I think I’ve more than tripled the number of Facebook friends in just these three or four years of college. So my only outlet pre-internet/social media boom, was tv shows. But back then they still didn’t have a lot a diversity. There was no one I could really relate to. So what I have to say in this post might sound completely stupid, but this is how TV saved my life.

So by now you know I was suicidal since I was about 11 and entering the 6th grade. TV was my life. The life I wanted. The life I couldn’t have. TV was my escape from this miserable reality. I still kept up with whatever superheroes shows were on. I think Teen Titans was still big and Smallville was in its prime. But I was also totally a Disney kid. If it was on Disney, I wanted to watch it. Same with Nickelodeon. I also watched a lot of (probably too much) detective murder mystery shows. Now like I said this was before Netflix had online streaming. You know when Blockbuster was still big (if you’re old enough to remember that; damn I’m getting old). Anyways you had to wait a week and stay tuned at that “same Bat-time” on that same “Bat-channel” if you wanted to see the next episode. If you missed it, that was it. You had to wait for the right re-run if you wanted to catch up (so archaic and medieval, right?). Before the DVR we used a VCR with tapes that you had to rewind to watch or else you’ll run out of tape, and then there was the danger of recording over something you haven’t watched yet.

Ok so here’s where you might start judging me.

What Would Jesus Wear - Who Am I? (Part 2)

So as I left off in Part 1, I struggled with my gender identity. Of course back then I didn't know what gender identity was so I was just plain confused about everything and I had no way of getting answers because I didn't even know what questions to ask.  Now, I was born male, and I was fine with that. I didn't even know what transgender was at the time, and then when I learned about it, it was something I seriously considered, but I have decided that I'm not exactly transgendered since I still mostly identify with being male.

So yeah, I was a boy who wanted to be a boy, but the struggle was that I didn't fit in with the other boys. I wasn't built for sports and that seemed like the only thing my brother and all the other boys at my school wanted to do. I was awkward