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On Teenage Lesbianhood
by Tully
One day, the world decided that most of this media was going to orbit one thing, just as it decided that teen girls' lives should orbit this one thing: boys.
I’m a story-driven person. Every waking hour, I consume stories in many different forms. Magazines, books, writing, talking, gossip, movies, essays. My list of story consumption is endless. I learn through stories, I explain through stories, I think in stories. In some ways, everyone does. But what happens when you reach the age when so many stories aimed at you, exclude you in lethal proportions? What happens when you no longer see yourself portrayed in the stories you consume? No one warns you how hard it is to navigate adolescence without a map, without media, and real people who reflect you and the life you want to lead. The absence of mirrors can sometimes lead one to believe they aren’t real. Stories are the things that tell you: Hey, you’re real. Hey, what you feel is real and normal. Hey, here’s what you are going to do next and why it’s going to be a-okay. It always is, isn’t it?
The inexplicable, unexplainable loneliness that comes with one's inability to desire men is inescapable. Teenagehood feels like such a strange stage of life, made even stranger by its often inhospitable attitude to queerness. My straight peers, if they so choose, have what feels like endless options for teenage love (or teenage flings). They flow through a stream of snapstages and boys from work, and things seem simple enough. But I don’t have the world. I’m limited to either the few other queer girls in my grade or looking in the outside world, which feels clumsy and risky. The options feel like they’re either isolate yourself, or risk drama.
So, I sit in class, listening to an acquaintance give me a full rundown on how she got her latest boyfriend: a random snap add, which led to talking and a completely sober fling. I’m happy for her, really. Yet, I can’t help feeling like I’m missing out on crucial life experiences. Like I’m on the outside of a club I’ll never gain membership to. Like she might not smile, and nod the same way if I were to tell her about my affairs.
There's no handbook for teenage lesbians. No blogs or kitchy self-help books on how to do things: how to move through this world. It doesn’t take long to mentally observe straight relationships enough to mentally develop a script, a timeline on how things are supposed to go. What is normal? What isn’t?
Hey Google, how does one initiate intimacy?
No, no, there are no binary gender roles…No, no, there are deep cultural phenomena that that advice ignores. No, none of this applies! There is no mother or aunty to step you through getting the girl. No one in my lineage is queer, at least not openly. No flowers shaped like me on the family tree. Once again, I’m the trailblazer who has to figure things out for my goshdang self, cause there are no grownups who look and love like me IRL. No one to show me that sapphic futures do truly exist, and that I’m not the only one of my kind.
Oh, how I wish there were a dyke-aunty mentor program. I want to hear stories that teach me things I need to know to survive so badly. The ones that make me giggle and gasp, messy and clean, beautiful and hope-filled, the ones that I can point to and say, ‘Wait, how did this end up? I have something going on just like this…’.
Stories that make me sigh, relax into my own body and say ‘Oh, it’s okay. People have survived this before.’
The desire for them clenches my throat like a thousand unsaid ‘please, tell me that story again.’
A teenage lesbian carried a loneliness that is not hers, deep in her bones. It’s inherited from those you never meet, passed down from those who fought for your right to survive. The heaviness is not yours, for you are not that different or segregated from your peers. One must bear an ancestral loneliness, a gift from the foremothers. See, the problem is, you want a life outside the mundane so bad it chokes you. God save me from white picket fence suburban life. Then again, haven't I always feared and rejected all that fears and rejects me? The stories that exist about familiar-looking partnerships don’t exist in a suburban world. Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Virginia Woolf, and the Parisian/Weimar club scene act as my bedtime stories. Is it any wonder a girl who only hears epic tales of knighthood and endless parties struggles to conceptualise and assimilate in a world of domesticity and 9-to-5s, with a cohort of peers given a manual on how to do just that?
Yet I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because how beautiful it is to be a part of this tale as old as we know, that soaks in the beauty that is women?
About the Author
Tully is a 17-year-old who's focused on finding as much joy in community and curiosity as possible. "On Teenage Lesbianhood" is a creative non-fiction ode to the loneliness and isolation that comes from being just ever so isolated from your peers, and without the older representation young people crave.