While my friends accepted my new feelings (mostly) easily, I tortured myself. I knew my feelings for girls were real – I felt them! – but how could I possibly be queer if I’d made it nineteen years on this earth without realizing it at all. Sure, I’d liked holding hands with my childhood friend Jess, and okay, I was a little unreasonably upset when Eliza acquired a boyfriend when we were 16, but surely that didn’t count as proof. At the end of the day, I had kissed and dated and fucked men for a long time, and I’d never considered that I might want to do those things with women too, or perhaps only with women exclusively, and so surely I had no business going around cloaking myself in this new queer identity. How could it possibly be real? If I hadn’t known it since I was small, was it a thing that could ever truly be mine?
Vanessa on Autostraddle.com
The entire piece Vanessa wrote in regards to Buffy and identity is lovely, but this one paragraph made me cry, and is my favorite part. To this day, I still question my identity since my love for ladies just came out of nowhere when I was 21, and not apparent since childhood. Finding out other queer ladies have/had this same struggle makes me not feel like the one lonely queer girl that just knew from a young age. Pieces like this are needed just as much as the ones written by people who did know from a very young age.
(via nickifm)
