Girls Like Girls Like Boys Do

My name's Katherine, I'm 16, and I like girls! I just came out, after 6 years in the closet, and I have never been happier.

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I literally just never got it when other girls would talk about boys. My friends would go crazy over them, we'd talk about them constantly, and I remember making up crushes at sleepovers just to have something to say. It sometimes got to the point where I half-convinced myself. But actually, the whole time, I had kind of a thing for my best friend, I thought she was literally perfect. We were so close, people would joke about us being lesbians together and my response was just HAHAHA. NO. DEFINITELY NOT. WHAT IS A LESBIAN?? THE RAINBOW FLAG IS SO DUMB WTF…. RAINBOW ISN’T EVEN A COUNTRY????

Anyway fast forward to this year, when we took a geography trip to Iceland (which was awesome). In principle, we were there to look at volcanoes or rock formations or something, but ooooh boy I do not remember a single second of that. What I ACTUALLY spent the whole week looking at was this girl.

She was SO. BEAUTIFUL. She was pretty, androgynous, she had a messy pixie cut and bright pink hair. Her whole aesthetic was literally enchanting to me and I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was also the first lesbian I ever met. She had an ex-girlfriend. She talked about girls like girls talked about boys.

She talked about girls like it was normal.

It felt like a whole new world was open to me suddenly. Maybe it had been there all along and I couldn’t see it because I had my eyes shut so tightly. I would keep steering the conversation onto gay topics and I hung on her every word. The last evening, when we were talking like usual on the balcony over the sea, she asked me if I liked girls. And I'd never thought of it like that before. I'd always been so hung up on if I was a lesbian, if I was gay, or bi, or whatever, and the words had seemed like they meant so much I never worked up the confidence to use any of them. But she asked me such a simple question. And I knew the answer.

I liked girls.

And for the first time, instead of brushing it off and laughing “I'm straight, obviously,” I stumbled over the words and accidentally they came out as, "Yes."

I was staring at my feet because I couldn't meet her eyes but I saw her smile. She leant over and put her head on my shoulder, and we sat like that in the twilight until the sun disappeared.

When I came back, I felt different. I felt like it was okay to be myself. I felt free. I understood that you don’t have to be exactly like everyone else in order to fit in, to have people accept you and like you. So I decided to come out to my best friend. I was afraid she’d think I was coming on to her or things would get weird, and I had a super long speech prepared that I'd been up all night writing. I was super nervous and I could hardly get the words out but before I was even a sentence past "I think I might like girls" she got up and hugged me and told me not to be stupid, we'd always be best friends and nothing could ever change that. (I definitely didn’t cry. There was something in my eye. ….Shut up.) Tbh I have no idea why I expected anything else.

Honestly it is so much weight off my shoulders, not to live with the constant fear of everybody Finding Out My Biggest Darkest Secret. It doesn’t bother me now, because I’m not ashamed of it - I am who I am, I accept myself and it was so pointless to ever try and be somebody else. Or to worry that people wouldn’t love me for who I truly am. My advice would be not to worry about labelling yourself. You don’t need to be able to describe who you are in order to be who you are. And there is nobody else on this Earth exactly like you.

So enjoy it!

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