The Cycle of Queer Grief

There aren’t very many days I wake up happy being queer.

I’ve been told many times by people to be happy and proud of who I am. I think as queerness has (thankfully) become more accepted, people often forget the struggle it has taken us to get here, the struggle many of us are still facing. Being told to be proud of who you are is easy when you’ve grown up without shame surrounding who you love or like. It’s an entirely different story growing up with an idea of what your life would look like and realising that you’re not going to get it.

I grew up with this idea that I’d marry somebody like my childhood crush, Percy Jackson. As a little girl, he was everything I ever wanted in a boy– funny, cute, a little dumb and protective of those he loves. The media I consumed as a kid all contained the same standard formula. There’s a boy, there’s a girl and somewhere along the way they fall in love and live happily ever after. It was everywhere I turned. If there was an anomaly to this equation, it was never given the same attention. I remember Glee being my first introduction to queer people, which is a bit of a crime in itself, but it was all that I knew back then. Out of the queer characters in Glee, the one that got the most coverage was Kurt, an out-of-the-closet gay high school boy. So even then, my reference for queerness came back to men. At school, everybody had crushes. My friends and I would sit in a little circle and discuss which boy we thought was cute. At home, my mother teased me over the crush I had on a boy we travelled with. See, this was everywhere. Movies, books, school, home. Everywhere I looked, I only saw one equation. Me, plus a boy equals a happily ever after. I never considered any other possibility.

I set about to find my real life Percy Jackson, thinking that surely if I find a boy like him I’ll finally feel happy and like I belong. It took me a long time to realise this isn’t something I’d ever get, and it’s not because somebody like him doesn’t exist somewhere out there. It’s just because I don’t like men the way I was taught to. The way I so badly want to. The way my parents so badly want me to.

Queer people grieve so much. It’s not talked about nearly enough. Nobody prepares you for the fact that you might not get the fairytale ending you so desperately wished for as a child. You’re not going to get the acceptance and excitement love stories about straight people get. I think lots of people interpret this grief as embarrassment when that’s not the case. I’m more than comfortable with the fact that I love women. I’m less comfortable with the fact that my relationship with my parents have forever changed. Just because I know liking women isn’t wrong and evil like I was taught doesn’t mean I don’t still hope I wake up one day with a change of mind because I’m tired of grieving what I’ve lost. Even at 25, I look at my current celebrity crush and I think maybe if I find somebody as nice as he is I won’t be a lesbian anymore. Maybe, there’s a chance I haven’t lost my prince and princess happy ending, maybe if I tried a little harder it would work, maybe there’s a way to still make my parents happy.

Maybe I won’t have to grieve anymore if I find this impossibly perfect man the media I consumed told me to want, I’ll be happy.

I still feel weird about writing this because I don’t have many lesbian friends. My brain likes to do this thing where it thinks of all the times I’ve thought about my fictional and celebrity male crushes to point out that I can’t be lesbian. It completely ignores the times in real life where I was approached by men and had panic attacks at their advances. It likes to remind me of all the boys I’ve kissed drunk and naturally forgets how sick I got following the encounter. It looks for any doubt I have on my sexuality and latches onto it with both hands, choking me to the point where I ignore all the other feelings, like how happy I was to be dating a girl and how the thought of kissing one didn’t make me ill. My brain likes to go through the five stages of grief about my sexuality regularly. It denies all the time– I can’t be a lesbian because I had boy crushes. It’s angry– why do you like women? What’s wrong with you? It bargains– maybe if you meet a guy who doesn’t want to have sex with you you’ll be straight. It’s depressed– I wish I was born differently. I wish I wasn’t queer. I wish I wish I wish...

And sometimes, on rare occasions, it accepts– I love women and I’m okay with that. I go through this grieving cycle so often. The only times I’m sure of myself are when I’m with my friends who remind me who I am. When my brain tells me I can’t be gay because I’ve had a boyfriend, my friends are the ones to remind me how miserable I was when it happened.

For those of us who haven’t been accepted by the ones they love the most, I’m not sure if the cycle of grief ever ends. It’s a disheartening thing to come to terms with, especially if you’re constantly surrounded by the people who deny you. I’m not entirely sure what the healing process for this looks like yet. I wrote this because I’m stuck in another cycle of grief just when I thought I was ready to accept my losses and move on. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed of myself. The little girl inside of me who knows she’s meant to be with another princess is just sad that she’s lost so much in the process of figuring that out.

I'm a recent graduate from the University of Cambridge with my Masters in Creative Writing. I've always been very emotional and try to relieve some of that through my writing. It's been my goal since I was a little girl to publish a book and I'm trying to steps toward that. I currently reside in Johannesburg South Africa at the age of 25 and am looking to make the world more aware of African writers and all we have to offer.