Early in life, I developed a habit of escaping my (sometimes) lonely and isolating reality by retreating into an ongoing fantasy of my “dream” future. In this imagined universe, I was older, prettier, more academically successful, and had (from my perspective) the ultimate symbol of social belonging: a long-term heteronormative relationship with a traditionally attractive male partner. His name was Jeffrey and everyone in my imaginary life absolutely loved him. In fact, he didn’t even seem to exist outside of the public sphere where we could bask in all the acceptance and approval of society’s expectations and he tended to mysteriously disappear when I imagined myself doing anything that didn’t have a captive audience. When I needed him, however, he was everything I could wish for: handsome, nice, athletic, and perhaps most importantly, taller than me (so as to magically alleviate my gradually worsening insecurity about my height, of course). Though I failed to understand this on a conscious level, Jeffrey in no way resembled a real person. He didn’t have flaws or complex personality traits, we didn’t have romantic moments alone, and I had no idea who his family was or what he enjoyed in life. Within my imaginary brain-land, he gave me all of the perceived social capital that came with being straight without actually having to find (or even imagine) an actual guy who I was attracted to.
By the time I reached the age when I might have been able to understand that I had been attracted to girls since I was very young, I was too trapped in my ongoing mission to become “normal” to even allow myself to consider the possibility of being anything but straight. Though my learning disability was still undiagnosed, this was also the time when it become apparent to me that there was something “wrong” with my brain because I didn’t always learn at the same pace as my peers. I spent a good number of years trying to reassure myself that no one could actually do the things I hadn’t yet been able to learn and that the most of the world was secretly unable to ride bikes, read clocks, or find their way around, but that some people must be really good at pretending. In some ways, I was the one who became good at pretending, while in other ways, it was difficult to hide that I was “different.” On the first day of fifth grade, I got every question wrong on our initial diagnostic assessment while everyone else seemed to somehow know what they were supposed to do. When my class took a biking trip, I was able to hide the fact that I could barely ride a bike until it came time for me to actually.. well… get on a bike, upon which my facade quickly fell apart. On top of that, it was blatantly obvious that I couldn’t retain isolated pieces of factual information or remember lists of instructions, and most multi-digit numbers would leave my mind immediately (phone numbers, page numbers, etc.)
Growing up in a college town, it often felt as if I had a moral responsibility to perform a specific kind of intelligence, lest I fail to live up to a perceived social standard of intellect and consequently become one of the “dumb” people who were so frequently villainized in dominant media narratives. Seeing as “smart” didn’t seem to be a label I could easily attain, I set my sights on a seemingly more attainable status marker: social capital and conventional desirability. (Side note: looking back, I realize that most pre-teens of of high social status probably don’t spend a whole lot of time analyzing their attained “social capital and conventional desirability” and perhaps I might have been better off just going after the performative image of intelligence thing but… I digress.)
While I was aware that I wasn’t exceptionally attractive compared to other girls around, I believed that I only needed to trick one boy into thinking I was pretty and then the rest of my life would be easy. The only issue was that I didn’t care about finding intimacy, companionship, and love with a boy so much as I did attaining the social stamp of approval for getting a dude to be attracted to me. But it wasn’t just about the performative element of a heteronormative relationship. As much as anything else, I also wanted to fulfill my own expectation of what heterosexual love was “supposed” to feel like. If you’ve ever read Martin and Kazyak’s Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films published in the 2009 edition of the Gender and Society journal, you may have made the connection that the experience I was having was closely tied to the common trope of heterosexual love “saving the world” identified in this essay. I had elaborate fantasies about finding the perfect husband and living happily ever after, but when I tried to imagine this dream partner as an actual living, breathing man… it was pretty much impossible.
When I was little, I spent many hours imagining what it would be like to be “normal,” whatever that meant. Perhaps it was because my mind didn’t work the same way as my peers’ or maybe it was simply a result of my struggle to fit in. To me, normalcy was the shiny object that I had my sights set upon— the thing that would finally bring me happiness and contentment and relieve my constant anxiety and self-doubt. Every decision I made came with an automatic question to myself: Which is the “normal”choice? When I got a little older, this thought pattern morphed into a habit of going out of my way to show how “normal” I was by pretending to have easily reached developmental landmarks along a socially-defined timeline. I occasionally found myself lying about having trouble finding parking (despite not being able to drive at all) or telling my classmates an assignment had only taken a short time to complete (when it had really taken hours). On the occasion that someone would challenge me to describe what “normal” actually looked like, I never had a definitive answer. What I didn’t realize at the time was that normalcy wasn’t an objective concept but an individually-constructed conceptualization of the ways in which acceptance, belonging, self-love, and contentment would manifest in an easily imaginable (ie outwardly visible) way.
I would like to say I’ve gotten better at this, but my lack of trust in the world to see me as “socially acceptable” tends to become apparent in (of all things) conversations with uber drivers. The liminality and anonymity afforded by a ride with a stranger often presents a tempting opportunity to lie when presented with questions like, “so, are you saving up for a car?” and “do you have a boyfriend?” Just today, I was riding with a man who managed to convincingly deliver an impassioned and inspirational speech about working hard and following my dreams in the ten minute ride from Chipotle to my apartment. At the end of the ride, he encouraged me to leave my hometown in the near future and skeptically asked if I had a boyfriend (presumably so as to see if I had anything keeping me in Ann Arbor). Though this may seem like an overstep for an uber driver, I assure you we had long since passed that point somewhere in the detailed story of his divorce that he had related a few minutes prior. For a moment I was tempted to say yes. Though Jeffrey had long since vanished into the depths of my distant imagination, I still wanted to see how it would feel to meet the societal heteronormative expectations being presented to me by an almost-stranger. In the end, my better judgement won out and I settled on lying by omission and simply saying, “no- not right now” (to be fair, he was a 66-year-old man who I had never met before…. and yes, I had in fact learned his exact age by the end of the ride.)
What I’ve finally come to realize is that I don’t wish I could be straight and neurotypical, but I still struggle to let go of the fantasy of “universal” acceptance that I falsely imagine those identities would bring. Though I’ve become more comfortable with being open about my sexuality with those who have already shown themselves to be accepting, I find it all but impossible to correct people when false assumptions come up in conversation. Part of it is the fear of rejection and disapproval and another part is the temptation to pretend for a moment that I am everything everyone expects me to be. It almost feels as if I’m “trying on” a false sense of universal social acceptance but knowing I can’t keep it. While I realize that this post probably reads more like a semi-cohesive and self-indulgent foray into my past through the lens of my secretly-sarcastic sense of humor than it does an educational or insightful article, I hope that I still managed to convey this: In all of my past anxiety and confusion, changing myself was never the answer. Even so, the allure of “normal” is difficult to resist, particularly when faced with the sometimes brutal culture of pre-teen social dynamics. While I often try to appear as if I’m more comfortable with my identities than I actually am, I sometimes find myself filled with anxiety when I have to explain my disability or sexual orientation. At the end of the day, the only “normal” we need is the shared understanding that there is no “normal.” When we recognize this on a collective level, I believe we will be able to finally begin to de-construct some of our social biases.
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