My parents were never religious people. I’m pretty sure they sent my sister and I to Catholic school thinking that we’d get a better education than in public school, and we’d be safer. And that may have been true. But I do wonder to what extent I may have been negatively impacted by the years of seeing Jesus nailed to a cross, with the nuns and priests reinforcing this as the ultimate symbol of sacrifice. Throughout my formative years, when my mind was most impressionable, I was taught that sinning is bad; people who sin burn forever in hell. God was a powerful man in the sky and I was a little girl on the ground being evaluated for the “goodness” or “badness” of my every decision. Then they told me I was already made of sin for being a human being because Adam and Eve ate an apple that God told them not to eat. And so every morning after the first school bell, my entire class had to recite the Our Father prayer in unison. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”
In the seventh grade, after six straight years spent wearing green knee socks and a plaid uniform, I switched from Catholic school to public school, where I felt even more out of place than before. It was 1998 and girls wore makeup, bellbottom jeans, and platform shoes. They chewed gum, spoke out, even cursed in class. The boys were just as much of a leap in the opposite direction of what I was used to. There were sporty kids and preppy kids and drug dealer kids (I had won a D.A.R.E. essay contest in the fifth grade, and up until this point, I thought drugs were something I would never encounter in real life). Everyone seemed to be part of a tightknit clique or a gang, and as far as I was concerned, they were all aliens from another planet. Needless to say, I felt culture-shocked and naive, ill-equipped to navigate this strange new land of pubescent people.
I remember shaking, literally shaking with social anxiety, before I knew what social anxiety even was. I trembled in the hallways and in all my classes each time a teacher made me read aloud or uttered the dreaded phrase, “Everybody find a partner.” My stomach was perpetually twisting, tightening around its own knots.
About halfway through my adolescence, I suddenly felt an enormous amount of pressure to find a boyfriend, to experience my first kiss, and to start experimenting with my body. Suddenly, everyone at school was dating, not just the first-to-bloom kids at the top of the social totem pole. But for me, there were obstacles. For starters, my hormones weren’t making me hungry for boys. Second, I still didn’t have an “in” with any particular group of people in my grade, nor was I willing to participate in contrived social activities like pep rallies and school dances. And third, possibly the biggest hurdle of all, was that I knew that in order to engage in any of these new experiences, I would have to become a woman in my parents’ eyes.
The thought of growing up felt somehow taboo to me, as if in doing so, I’d be letting down two of the only people I’d ever truly cared for. I’m not entirely sure what led me to feel this way. It could’ve been because both of my parents were very involved in my life and seemed very attached to being parents, and so perhaps I was afraid I’d hurt them if I was no longer their little girl. My home life and the role I played in my family as a child was the only comfort I’d ever really known. My parents’ love and approval was my greatest sense of security and self-esteem.
I grew up with one sibling, my twin sister, Kristy, and we had similar feelings of guilt attached to our impending developing selves. I recall, for example, hoping to God that Kristy would get her period for the first time before I did so that she could pioneer coping with the shame and embarrassment that would come with it. But sure enough, one day while playing volleyball in gym class, I felt a painful, burning sensation between my legs, and when I went to the bathroom, all I saw was red. Of course I panicked. I purchased a Kotex pad from the cold metal vending machine for feminine products (thank all the goodness in the world it wasn’t empty, and that I found a quarter in my book bag). Moments later, I found myself on a payphone with my mom, voice trembling, completely mortified, confessing to her that I was having my “time of the month” for the first time. My mom’s voice on the other end of the line was motherly and joyful. “We’ll have to celebrate when you get home,” she said. But I was afraid of what that celebration would entail. In fact, now that I was bleeding like a woman, I couldn’t imagine how life would go on.
This mortification around my femininity surfaced in many other ways as well. For one, I always felt awkward changing in front of other girls in the gym locker room. Long before it ever occurred to me I might be attracted to women, I felt “naughty” for being able to see other females undressing in my peripheral vision. My body was a different body—not like theirs. My discomfort with my own parts was furthered by the fact that I didn’t shave my legs or armpits until high school, so I dreaded wearing shorts that would expose my hairy limbs.
In the lunchroom, boys would approach me from time to time, and it was always the same story: “Hi, my friend thinks you’re cute. He’s sitting over there. He wants to know if you’d like to go out sometime.” I always said no without looking, unable to imagine uttering the phrase to my parents, “I’m going out with a boy.” I was equally incapable of imagining myself batting my eyelashes and flirting playfully with a seventh-grade boy. I just wasn’t ready.
Things got confusing when I became friends with a girl named Jessica. Jessica was slightly more popular than I was. In my mind, she was my ticket into a higher popularity bracket, and so making sure she liked me was important. The problem was that every time Jessica was around me, I’d become filled with a paralyzing anxiety. When the second period bell rang, I’d begin trembling, knowing I was going to see her in my third period typing class. Eventually, I started going over to Jessica’s house and she would occasionally come over to mine. We did basic things together—played checkers, played video games, and ate dinner with either her parents or mine.
I don’t recall there being anything profound about our friendship, nor did we ever become particularly close. But it’s funny the way people sometimes enter our lives just to teach us things about ourselves. It’s funny the way a moment can shift you. One day I went over to Jessica’s house just as she and her mom were getting home from the grocery store. I went to the trunk of the car to help carry some of the groceries, but Jessica smiled and refused to allow me to help. Instead, she grabbed every plastic bag, her arms overloaded, and all I could think was, “That’s hot.” I don’t know why, or where the thought came from. But it turned me on somewhere in my body, the fact that she took it upon herself to spare me from this one silly chore. Days later, I woke up from a dream where Jessica was on top of me, making out with me. And all I thought was, “That’s interesting.”
Here’s something I’ve come to accept: we can’t deny the ways in which we are shaped by our upbringings—regardless of the intentions of our caretakers. Our parents play an undeniably significant role in influencing our personalities, our temperaments, and the ways we come to view the world, especially when we are young. Also, we are shaped by more than our experiences—we’re shaped by the meaning we assign to those experiences. That said, my parents are two of the most loving people on this earth and I’m grateful beyond words for them both. But I’d be leaving out an important part of my story if I didn’t include their effect on me as a teenager.
My mom was the primary caretaker for my sister and I throughout our developing years, while my dad worked very long hours as a salesman. She carried much of the burden of caring for two twin girls, often on her own, and dedicated much of her life to our wellbeing. Perhaps because of this, she was very overprotective of my sister and I growing up—nothing I did made it past her, and in her mind, imminent danger was always just ahead. As kids, my sister and I weren’t allowed