The Heartache and Confusion of Coming Into Queerness
Striving for academic achievement put me on autopilot. Now, I am finally feeling my way through liminal space.
“I can’t bear to do the same thing over and over every day anymore.”
For weeks, I had been whining to whoever was willing to listen about how I just wanted to be done with the biggest project I had ever undertaken: my Master’s thesis in philosophy. Then, on a random Thursday afternoon, I was in fact finally done.
I was officially finished ‘doing the same thing over and over.’
The banality of the moment when I submitted the document perplexed me. In reality, this is a huge milestone, yet it feels like the enormity of what I have just completed is only dawning on me days later.
I do not intend to walk you through my thesis timeline in this story. In many ways, it was all a blur anyway. The only thing that went according to plan was that I submitted a thesis on time that roughly discussed what I had outlined in my proposal.
No, what is much more interesting about the last nine months is the life that happened along the way and in between. It is because of my development that this project was as enormous as it was. In length, it was a little longer than the typical novella — short of 28,000 words. But I was a different person when I started than when I finished.
The leap that I made from one state to another is what makes my thesis submission particularly destabilizing. It is not uncommon to see marathon runners collapse at the finish line. With an academic project driving me (to the brink of insanity, at times), it felt like I had been running away from my old self without any regard for how tired my legs, lungs, and heart had become. Especially during the last six weeks, all I could think of every morning was that I had to keep going, or I’d be in serious trouble.
My thesis writing process was accompanied by various big moments and events: a self-rediscovery, a gradual coming out as non-binary and pansexual, and a romantic breakup.
Now that I’ve stopped running, it’s time to truly feel what coming into queerness feels like. And the way things worked out for me, this process does not come without sadness — or without, often reluctantly, allowing a new narrative to unfold.
The night after I hit ‘submit,’ I slept like a champion. The next day, I emerged from my bed with an aching heart. Heartache is a perpetual shapeshifter. No heartache is ever the same.
I know what a broken heart feels like and how to mend it. But this heartache feels different. A multitude of emotions are tugging my heartstrings in various directions: the worry that I have never loved selflessly, a beautiful memory of something I have willingly given up; the longing for queer love and the simultaneous fear that, in all the life-altering decisions I have made recently, I have been led too much by my colorful imagination.
It’s not the kind of heartache that suffocates you. But like a stiff back or a chronic cough, it is always there and flares up at particularly inconvenient times.
Maybe I did not think things through. Now I have to deal with this mess.
Nobody is better at writing about the unfiltered and vulnerable parts of being a queer woman than pop singer and songwriter Tove Lo. In ‘Suburbia,’ she describes the inner dialogue of a woman at the precipice of entering a conventional life:
I-I don’t want suburbia
I don’t need routines and lies
I hope you know that I know
You are the love of my life
But I-I-I can’t be, no Stepford wife
In moments of sadness, I often hear myself think that I threw away a perfectly good life for the promise of something better. It looks like during the race that was my thesis, I have run so far away from my old self that the memory of my life pre-thesis has been colored sepia.
But then I listen to ‘Suburbia’ again, and I remind myself that this ‘perfectly good life’ was, in many ways, just a dream I felt compelled to chase to feel secure.
It is this security that made me feel incredibly blessed. The first year with my ex-partner was arguably one of the happiest I have ever experienced. Somehow it is hard to imagine I will feel blessed again, as if rejecting a ‘perfectly good’ life deserves lifelong punishment. But a ‘perfectly good’ life was never something I genuinely wanted. It is a band-aid for my abandonment wound. Nothing more.
At some point, I had to rip off the band-aid and take a good look at all the hurt. And as we all know, ripping off a band-aid can sting for a second — or a little while longer, in my case.
I spent the first two days after my thesis submission celebrating (various things) with friends. When the festivities were over, silence permeated my life very quickly. It was only then that I looked in the mirror for real — and saw a different person. I hadn’t really looked at myself for the past months. I just did whatever I needed to do to tame my hair and ran out the door to begin another day of writing.
Now, without a bus to catch or a chapter to finish, I’ve had plenty of time to observe myself. If looking in the mirror is a dialogue between the observer and the observed, both residing inside of us, I have found the biggest shift to have occurred in the observer. It is not the same blue eyes that are looking back at me as nine months ago.
And as much as the observer in me has learned to deal with complexity, he is utterly perplexed. He cannot make sense of the fact that as I have been coming into my queer identity, what gave me the push to make some changes to my life was an encounter that was anything but queer. A break-up happened in tandem with admiration for someone new; a simultaneous falling in and out of love.
It is a paradoxical situation, to say the least. But I guess experiencing excruciatingly straight feelings is also part of my newly gained freedom as a queer person.
It’s been many weeks since I've truly felt like I have a body. For a while, I’ve been living in my head way more than anyone should. Striving for academic achievement does that to people.
Unused, my body stiffened. Now, I move it slowly and carefully again every day. I breathe into my sides and lower back as I stretch my arms in front of me in extended child’s pose, and I ground down through my thighs in cobbler’s pose, keeping my shoulders down. I finally feel my sense of self shift and expand from my head and eyes to my belly, fingers, and toes. With this increased awareness, I am learning to inhabit my body in all the ways that the boxes I was in before never allowed me to.
As my joints are loosening up again, I wish I could say that with each passing day, I am seeing more and more progress in making sense of my identity, too. But the truth is that misalignment has become my new normal. Sometimes my body feels right, and I feel wrong for liking it, questioning my queerness. Other times I dream of another body, feeling shockingly sure about who I am and what that could mean for my life.
When it comes to my gender identity, I have dared to begin an existence in liminal space not just as part of a bigger transition but by inhabiting that space in its own right. At the same time, I cannot shake the feeling that life would have been easier if I had just stayed in my lane, as some would say. Did I take into account how coming out would affect all areas of my life before letting everyone on the internet know?
But I know that any downsides I might have considered before would not have changed my reality. My identity is. The choice was between owning it or continuing to tell myself lies.
Still, maybe lying to myself would have been easier. With the world being the way it is, maybe this feeling will never fade. I’ve been distracted from truly feeling my way through all this while I was immersed in my academic work. Finishing it all is kickstarting a whole new crisis.
Liminal space is uncomfortable. Now, I finally have the capacity to sit in that discomfort.
Thank you for reading this piece. It means a lot to me. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider following me. And if you would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee!
