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pickledchickenetti · 5 years

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My first kiss happened when I was 12 years old.

One of my good friends was placed into another Christian school several towns away when her parents decided the school we’d both gone to since kindergarten was too small. Up until that time, we’d been used to seeing each other every day at school, frequently on the weekends, and even some days before school when her mom had to work an early shift and would drop her off at my house to ride to school with us. We went months without seeing each other, then finally convinced our parents to let us have a sleepover.

She climbed into the back of my mom’s minivan with me as my mom got out to say hello to her mom. We started chatting about how excited we were to see each other again when suddenly she leaned in and kissed me right on the lips. After a brief pause where we both realized what had happened, we continued with our chatter about how long it had been and how we were going to have so much fun together. It was a brief kiss that was practically over before it started.

If this were a lesbian coming-of-age novel, that kiss likely would have taken place in the first chapter. It would have been preceded by some exposition about how many kids had left my school and how I’d missed my sleepovers with my good friend. Chapter one would have ended with the kiss, and then the next few chapters would be filled with inner turmoil or angst or pining for her as we returned to our separate schools the following Monday. Perhaps it would have mentioned the other friend who we picked up after that and how she sat between us in the van or how neither of us were able to pay much attention to her for the rest of the night because we were too focused on the kiss and what it meant and if we liked each other.

My life is not a lesbian coming-of-age novel, and none of those things actually happened.

What did happen is that we acted like it never happened, and, as far as I know, neither of us ever mentioned it again. It was a quick moment that didn’t really mean anything, and we both moved on.

The only reason it means anything now is that I only recently remembered it. Before this, I managed to repress this memory for fifteen years.

Repression has a way of really fucking with your perception of reality. It takes years, possibly even a lifetime, to rediscover old feelings and get those memories back. It isn’t linear. Things come back to you at random, and it’s impossible to know if you’re ever done recovering the things you forced into the darkest recesses of your subconscious.

Tracking my history of always being gay is sometimes like trying to piece together dinosaur bones that are found on paleontological digs. Some people you think that realizing you’re gay is like finding the whole dinosaur all at once, when really it’s like finding a torso and then having to go out in search of all of the other bones to piece the dinosaur together. As new memories surface, you try to connect them to the things you’ve already remembered so you can create a timeline for yourself.

This kiss took place the same year I started to realize I was different than other girls in some way, and as a result I started lying about having crushes on boys so the other girls wouldn’t think I was weird. It was shortly after I did a tore apart two sets of kissing bunny stickers for a craft project at the local Christian book store and stuck the two girl bunnies on the craft where they were kissing each other; I later got scared of someone seeing that and hid the project in a set of shrubs in the mall so no one would know I’d put the stickers like that. The kiss took place a few years after the first “celebrity” crush I can remember (Disney Channel actress Lindsey Haun), and the first classmate crush I can remember (a cute third grader who looked like a redheaded version of my favorite background character from the Mary Kate & Ashley “You’re Invited” movies). The kiss was two years before I’d meet my first openly gay person, and four years before my first boyfriend put his hand on my leg at the movies and I spent a week wondering if that was okay and if I was supposed to feel something as a result.

If I had been straight and that kiss had been from a boy, it would have been something I would have hid from my parents for a few years and then shared as the cute story of my first kiss when I got a little older. Instead, it’s a moment that I hid from myself for fifteen years, only to remember it when it was far too late to really remember how it made me feel at the time or if there was anything else to it. It makes me wonder what other similar memories could still be buried in there, and if I will ever remember them. But more importantly than that, it serves as yet another reminder that this is real and I have always been this way. Despite what my parents and others say about my sexuality being a phase that God will save me from one day or something I decided to be as an adult, the fact is that was a part of me before I even knew what gay was, and I am not making it up. While I obviously know that that’s true, it gets exhausting constantly trying to combat the negativity that comes from people who think my very existence is sinful.

This friend and I fell out of touch by high school. I have no idea where she is now or who she grew up to be. I have no memories of having been attracted to her, and no idea if she ever felt that way about me. I hope whoever she is now, she’s been able to figure herself out and she’s happy.

#exvangelical #homosexuality #personal

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emotual · 6 years

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thank you to everyone who has taken the time to talk to me about this, has reached out to me because of this, and who is taking the time to read this now, i love you all so much.

i pretty much document everything on here, so i’m sure you all know what i’m going to be talking about, but i do it in the hopes of helping someone else and/or to help someone feel less alone. if i can put myself out there, be vulnerable, and at the same time help someone else while i’m being the most authentic version of myself, then i’ve accomplished all that i wish to accomplish. at the end of the day, i just want to help people and be me. i know i don’t owe anyone an explanation, but i just wanted to be open about this with all of you.

about two or three months ago i started to question my identity; not only my sexuality but also my gender. i feel like it was an accumulation of things from even a couple months before that. i’ve felt so comfortable in myself for so long that beginning to question who i was really threw me off, so i hid it from everyone including myself. it hit me hard around the beginning of pride month (go figure) and then hit me hard again in july when i really started to process everything.

my whole life has really thrown me off course. i wrote about my coming out experience earlier this year, and i thought i had everything figured out.

what i’m getting at is, identifying as a lesbian, doesn’t feel right to me anymore. i think that i have the capability of loving anyone. maybe 13 year old me was right after all.

as some of you know i identified as bi for about a decade. i’ve dated men and women throughout my life.

my life is tricky, there’s been abuse from my mother, i’ve seen abuse from men, men have also abused me (the majority of the men i’ve dated in fact), and maybe that’s what convoluted things. maybe i’m healing and maybe that’s why i’m rediscovering myself, or maybe it’s something else.

i put off processing this for so long because i didn’t want to seem like a fraud. i felt very comfortable in calling myself a lesbian for these few years, i thought i really knew myself. and it does hurt, all of it does. thinking about the possibility of not only being into women terrified me, i felt like i was going in reverse, i was afraid of what those closest to me would think (and still fear that once i tell more people in the future). i thought about my mother (who has no right to this information) and her delight at the thought of me possibly marrying a man, her daughter, finally “normal” enough again to talk about with her friends — my mother’s previous abuse as a teen hitting me in the face once again.

and with all of that fear i found a sense of peace. i’ve talked about my lovers heart before, and as soon as i reminded myself that this is about love; reminding myself of that as often as i could, i relaxed. because that is what this is about at the end of the day, my heart.

it’s my life, and i don’t want to force a piece of myself away because im afraid of what others think of me when all that matters is what i think of me. am i really going to push love away so i wake up one morning in my 70s cursing at myself for shutting myself down because of people around me, when it is my life and i want to live it as truthfully as i can? i never want any version of life for myself if it is without love.

after all ive been through and all i’ve seen in my life i owe it to myself to be as authentic and as genuine with myself as i can. 13 year old me would want that, 70 year old me wants that too. i’ve always lived like every day is my last one, so here i am.

with all of this, though, i’ve also become more comfortable in being nonbinary. it’s helped solidify that and not make me so scared of it like i have been since i came out.

so hey, i’m ash, and i’m not a lesbian! i’m definitely more into women, but like i mentioned i have the capability of loving anyone. for now the label i feel most comfortable with is gay, maybe in the future i’ll switch to bi, but for now gay is what feels the best to me. even though bi is very much what i am. it’ll just take time like most things do, everything will come together in the end.

anyway, as strong as i am, i am still terrified. a lot of you have told me that i was an inspiration for you and helped you realize that you were a lesbian, but i hope that you all can love me just the same.

i hope that all of you know that you also deserve to live your truth, even if that only means being true with yourself for now. take things at your own pace, but also know that if you once identified as something and then rediscovered yourself it’s okay, or if you’re discovering yourself for the first time, that’s okay too.

i’m always here if you need someone to talk to, you deserve a life where you can be authentically you, always always always. take care of yourselves, be safe, stay true, and love who you are. i love you all so much.

#we’re going ✈️ bisexuality #d//on/t///re/blo///g/#im only coming out to those closest to me irl right now those that know right now are the only people that will know for a while #thank you again to everyone for reaching out to me listening and reading this i love you #abuse mention #mother mention #long post #about me #my writing

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sumquiasum · 5 years

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Tagged by @violet-nocturne, thank you Sofi ily

rules: answer 21 questions and tag 21 people you would like to get to know better

nickname: ami, vaike

zodiac: Aries Sun, Sag moon, Cancer rising

height: around 170 cm

last movie i saw: What We Do in the Shadows (thanks letterboxd.)

favourite musician: MIKA, Panic! at the Disco, Stromae (I'm rediscovering his music and I'm just blown away all over again) and Bastille but mostly for the lyrics

song stuck in my head: whenever I see this phrase, I immediately have Favourite Record by Fall Out Boy playing in my head because of the line "you are the song stuck in my head / every song that I've ever loved / play it again and again and again / and you can get what you want but it's never enough" (might be wrong, I've never looked up the lyrics but that's what I always hear)

do i get asks: if I haven't just reblogged an ask game, no (and even then I sometimes don't)

other blogs: too many. a lesbian blog @talking-lesbianly, my writblr @writtelings, an always sunny and a twilight blog, a quote blog, a blog where I compile resources and references and many more.

following: 548

favourite song: right now it's hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it by Lana del Rey and Good Wife by MIKA (I'm in a bit of a Mood atm but it's alright). an all-time favourite is House of Memories by Panic! at the Disco

amount of sleep: 5-13 hours

lucky numbers: 3, 7, 21 (so I'm excited for my birthday this year!!)

what am i wearing: pjs, I just woke up

dream job: something that will pay the bills and leave me with enough energy to pursue other interest after work. or, if we're talking "dream job" in the sense of "will never happen anyway", then I'd say actress atm

dream trip: I'd really like to see the ocean again, I miss it. Also mountains would be nice, I've been in flat land for so long. My next trip is gonna be with my family (I don't know where to cause we're not done planning that) and after that I'm gonna go to Serbia with two friends and I'm excited for both of those!!

favourite food: uhm... probably domoda with couscous, and macarons (at literally any given moment I'd love to be eating macarons they are the perfect pastry, especially French ones cause they're not as overly sweet as the ones they make here in Germany) oh, and also persimmons, they are incredibly delicious!

instruments i play: piano and recorder (gave a little concert with my brothers for Christmas), I also used to play the oboe

last book you read: Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and even though it was for class it was one of those books that just touched me on a personal level. I don't know if I love it but I'm looking forward to reading it again.

last song you listened to: No Place in Heaven by MIKA

random fact: I like doing card tricks even though a) I'm not very good at them yet b) I only know four (but that's four more than the avarage person so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) sidenote: I also just got my period what kind of witchcraft is this

describe yourself as an aesthetic thing: a library filled with the smell of books, rays of sun dancing through the window and a spring breeze that brings the smell of new flowers and freshly cut grass

tagging: I can't think of anyone rn cause I just woke up but if you wanna do it, feel free! I always like reading these! (you can even request to be tagged if you feel more comfortable with that)

#ask meme #dragon roars #long post

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lesbiancouplescounseling · 2 years

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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 7 years

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How I Overcame Reader’s Block (And So Can You!)

As a kid, I adored reading. Okay, more specifically, I enjoyed reading about dragons, but that’s not the issue here.

It frequently coincided with my equally as intense love of climbing trees, and some of my fondest memories involve being perched in a small tree and reading some hopelessly goofy, dragon-related literature while my mom and toddler siblings used the playground equipment. If no climbable trees were available, I’d settle for reading under one and drinking a thermos of chocolate milk while they ran around in the park.

As I got older, my tastes got a little more eclectic as I encountered Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Anne Shirley, the residents of Narnia and Middle Earth, respectively, and much to my mother’s horror, Stephen King, but my passion remained more or less the same.

Bottom line is, I loved reading. It was my paramount joy, my primary source of entertainment, and I didn’t think that would ever change.

So imagine my shock when, around my sophomore year of college at the age of seventeen, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really read for pleasure since I discovered the Hunger Games a year or two prior. Moreover, and equally as horrifically, when I tried to read I found I couldn’t focus; regardless of the quality of the story and how much I wanted to read it, the investment was gone.

Whether this was due to my first stint with organized education (prior to college, I was homeschooled) or the fact that I’d grown accustomed to the bite-sized chunks of candy-flavored, insubstantial information served up by the internet, the sad and simple fact was that I had fallen out of love with reading, and it looked like it was going to stay that way forever.

Well, flash forward two-point-five years to Present-Day Brooksie, and since school got out in early May, I’ve read Chuck Palahniuk’s Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, Emma Straub’s The Vacationers, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. Despite the disappointing lack of dragons, I loved all of them.

I drink books like nectar again, if you’ll pardon the floral language, and everything from the quality of my writing to the quality of my life has improved as a result of it.

So how did I fall back in love with reading? Well, I’ve spent a lot of time pontificating on this, and as far as I can tell, it can be narrowed down to three factors:

1. Reading every day.

It started with lunch. Every day, when I’d sit down at my university cafe, I used to get out my laptop and watch YouTube or whatnot while I ate my sandwich -- a cool idea in theory, but really sort of gross whenever I rubbed my greasy fingers on the mouse and keyboard.

When I made a conscious decision to read more, I began taking out my book and reading during the lunch period instead. It didn’t come naturally at first -- I was easily distracted and kept zoning out -- but I ultimately found it very pleasant, especially when I listened to some classical music in the background as well (nice for atmosphere, and for drowning out noise and distractions.)

I kept doing it.

When that summer rolled around, I rediscovered an amazing little outdoor cafe by the harbor. It had no wifi, which for my purposes, was absolutely perfect.

I went there to read Good Omens and eat home baked lemon squares, pie, and banana bread, listening to international tourists speak in other languages, and watch the boats go by. It was a beautiful environment, and that (coupled with the fact that Good Omens is just really fucking awesome) made it easier than ever for me to want to stay longer and become more engrossed in what I was reading.

Afterwards, I’d take out my notebook and work on my own stories and journal. Overall, I’d say that summer was one of the most intellectually productive I’ve had.

Once school started again, it got a little harder to read every day, but by then my love of reading had pretty much caught: it had become an intellectual drug for me again, a source of comfort, pleasure, and inspiration. Also, it was another viable excuse to procrastinate on my academic responsibilities, which was always welcome. So I kept reading. It was still a relatively slow process, as I had to work around my already busy schedule, but the more I read the more adept I became at drinking in the information in hungry, satisfying gulps (a bit more suggestive than I’d initially intended that metaphor to be, but I’m going to go with it.)

But this isn’t to say that there were no bumps in the road back to bibliophilia. There was another factor that I had to grasp before I reached the point where I could unabashedly adore reading once again.

Which is:

2. Reading what excites me.

No, I’m not speaking sexually, you pervert. I’m talking about books I actually want to read.

When I first started trying to get back into literature, I started trying to read the classics exclusively, like Around the World in Eighty Days and Little Women. Let me be clear, these books are amazing (excluding the jarring amounts of racism and endorsements of British colonialism in the former) but after semesters of reading similar works for my literature seminars, they just felt a little like...academia.

In fact, the only reason I was insistent on reading classics exclusively, I now realize, was because I was a pretentious, pseudo intellectual little shit back in those days with a horrible case of impostor syndrome. What I needed to re-learn was what dragon-loving, Ten-Year-Old Brooksie long since already knew: the best way to enjoy reading is to read what you actually enjoy.

It was a lesson I slowly but surely remastered, and it took me a while to realize that modern literature is teaming with smart, enriching reads, like Life of Pi, American Gods, Where’d You Go Bernadette, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Help, Everything I Never Told You, and countless others.

Moreover, these were books I didn’t have to force myself to read; they were books I found myself reading at four AM because I didn’t want to stop.

I’ve also discovered classics that I can eat up in a matter of days, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Which absolutely everyone should read, by the way: Francie Nolan is a feminist icon, and way, way ahead of her time, not to mention it’s fucking hilarious and will make you cry like a little bitch), Jane Eyre, and basically anything written by Jane Austen. I love these books for their sharp wit, applicable and timeless life observations, and striking lack of the pretentiousness that I’d come to associate with a lot of classic literature.

This summer, I my reading list includes Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I’m looking forward to reading each and every one of them.

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make here is that there’s no joy to be found in pretentiousness: don’t read to prove yourself as an intellectual. Read to enrich your soul, read what you legitimately enjoy, and read what inspires you.

Which brings me to my next and final point...

3. Reading what inspires me.

This one might be true specifically for my fellow authors, but since I know a large portion of my followers are fellow authors, I think it’s applicable here.

Ever since I was an infinitesimally small child, I’ve wanted to write stories. When I was fourteen I wrote a hopelessly angsty YA novel about a half-dragon girl named Freedom and her misadventures with an ambiguously lesbian vampire and werewolf duo, a seductive and ambiguously bisexual elf (it was a time of self discovery for me), and a talking lion. When I was eleven, I wrote a middle grade novel about a little boy who befriends a dragon. When I was four, I wrote *ahem!* drew wordless stories about a winged wolf-creature named Starlight and his (in retrospect, overtly gory) battles with monsters.

It was bizarre, cringey, and I’m not gonna lie, pretty fucking awesome.

Around the time I started college at around sixteen, I’d just decided I wanted to start writing again. I had lots of ideas, and I remember in detail getting yelled at by my manager for scribbling in my notebook behind the counter instead of dutifully smiling at customers the way I was supposed to.

But my writing was...well, to put it bluntly, it was really, really bad. It only began to improve when I resolved to write every day. It noticeably and drastically began to improve when I began to read works that I found creatively inspiring.

While I was revising my manuscript, I read a lot of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, both masters of the kind of urban fantasy I was attempting to write, and spent a lot of time figuring out what I loved most about their writing and how to best apply it. This was also around the time I began reading Douglas Adams, which was, let me tell you, a magical experience. It involved a lot of delighted gasping on my end and thinking you’re allowed to do that?

It really showed me what the barriers were for creative writing, or in this case, total lack thereof.

I think I owe these writers a lot for helping me to create several novel-length manuscripts I’m incredibly proud of, and one that I’m currently preparing to get published.

So in closing, for anyone suffering from reader’s block, feel free to try my approach: read every day, read what you love and not to stoke your ego, and for my writer peeps, read what inspires you.

Either way, my books and I are enjoying a passionate long-term relationship, and every day I find myself loving them more.

#story time #the author speaks #reading #writing #books

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