I'd Been Out of Touch with My Emotions Since Forever, Apparently
Introspection and realization from a conversation with Miriam yesterday evening:
I figured out some years ago that I've made a lot of the worst decisions in my life because I was trying to make them rationally and ignoring my emotions about them. However, reading Milk Morinaga's "Girlfriends" again led me to a realization about one such decision I made even further back in time than others that I've had that realization about. (Some spoilers about Girlfriends here, which are relevant to my realization.)
Girlfriends is a yuri love story about two high school girls, Mari and Akko. For quite a while, Mari is clearly crushing on Akko but has no idea that she is, despite patently obvious signs. She wants to spend more and more time with her. Going on a group date with other friends, Mari started crying at the thought that Akko might find a boyfriend and have less time for her. Together at Akko's home one evening, Mari was looking at her sleeping friend's face and thinking about how pretty her eyelashes were and, without thinking about it, leaned in and kissed her. (Which she was immediately ashamed of doing because of lack of consent. But she told Akko later, who brushed it off. "Is that all? Friends kiss all the time!") Mari learns that Akko had a boyfriend who she slept with the year before Mari met her, and was basically heartbroken at the thought that Akko might still have feelings for this boy, even while telling herself how her pain didn't make sense because she hadn't even met Akko a year ago and it's not like she and Akko were dating or something. And there's more.
Yet, they'd been close friends for something like a year before Mari finally had connected the dots, as she was rushing up the train station stairs to get to Akko as quickly as she could because the escalator was too slow, and realized that she has romantic feelings for Akko.
I was telling Miriam about this and saying that though from an outside perspective Mari's cluelessness is amazing, it actually kind of makes sense. I can imagine being a teen who has never even considered the possibility that girls could be attracted to other girls trying to figure out what all these weird feelings mean. It connects to experiences of my own. One is my complete failure to realize I was trans despite clues written in metaphorical giant blinking 500-point font letters. Miriam had her own experiences as a teen that show how much most humans want to interpret things in ways that fit their preexisting models: she had sexual dreams about women and logically concluded that she must have been a man in those dreams and that's why she was attracted to women in them. Being something other than straight wasn't a negative thing for her: it just didn't fit her mental model and she never even considered the possibility.
Now I've thought for some time that my own belief that I was completely gender-agnostic in terms of who I was attracted to was because I wanted to validate my own feelings of queerness somehow. Maybe I'd decided that this was my community, somehow, and being a boy who only liked girls didn't fit into that self-concept. I'd talked to Miriam about that before, and repeated my thoughts on it as we talked. Shortly after, while brushing my teeth, I realized that probably wasn't exactly it. "There's more to it!" I exclaimed, in what was likely a completely unintelligible attempt to vocalize through a mouth full of toothpaste.
I came back in the room and said that this was probably, in fact, another example of me making decisions that made fundamental alterations in the course of my life by analyzing them logically and ignoring how I actually felt. I went to my first fan convention by myself, without my parents, in 2002. I met a guy there who, not too long afterward, tried to get me into bed. I was completely unprepared for that, even at the age of 23, as a terribly shy person who hardly knew how to have friends, let alone how to engage with someone sexually, even less someone who I thought was of the same sex. But was I actually interested in men? In the days after, I thought about it and decided, rationally and logically, that it didn't make sense to exclude half the population of the planet from consideration as romantic or sexual partners merely because they were male. I couldn't think of any rational reason not to be bi, so I must be bi.
Friends, I like girls. I like girls a lot. I might just maybe possibly go for a masc person if there was something special about them. But there would really have to be something special about them. (I think my sweetie Erik fit into that category.) And while the shittiness of a lot of cis guys is, in fact, a rational reason to feel that way, it's a lot more than that, and it's stuff that I can't really explain rationally. I just really like girls. Kind of like I know I'm really a girl and it means everything to me to be one, even though I still have no real rational explanation for feeling that way and didn't figure it out for 35 years because it "didn't make sense."
So I think that I thought I was basically 50/50 bi for most of 20 years because *not* being bi didn't make any rational sense. It helped (or, rather, hurt) that I had no real idea how to relate to people that way as a boy so it's not like I was really learning about myself from experience. I didn't have anything making me question my mental model.