The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
10— Wednesday, April 14, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
statement
Becoming Alice
I
like to joke that I-94 and I-80 are my second
homes. I’ve spent thousands of miles on them,
miles that trade scenery for ease — hop on and
drive, no directions needed. The “check engine” light
on the dashboard of my old car kept me company, a
constant presence lingering in the corner of my vi-
sion. It was accompanied by a symphony of other
warning lights who came and went as they pleased.
My brain felt a lot like that dashboard: internal prob-
lems and topics I didn’t understand simmering away
under layers of metal and avoidance.
“It’s when the lights aren’t flashing that some-
thing’s actually wrong,” I’d profess to nervous passen-
gers with a laugh. “She runs just fine.”
Of course, she didn’t. My car, referred to by friends
as “the Deathbox,” eventually ended up in the shop,
a mechanic instructing my parents to never let me
drive it again. “The frame’s rusted out,” the mechanic
told them. “If she gets hit, the car will basically disin-
tegrate.”
Turns out, an inadvertent car crash is what hap-
pens when you bushwack through life on someone
else’s rules. I’d had warning lights simmering in my
body for years, finally coming into themselves during
my first years of college. My warning lights looked like
nervous shots of Svedka in my dark kitchen while my
boyfriend drove to my house, my first time looming,
unspoken, between us. It’s easier when you’re drunk,
obviously. And more fun. Or, later, anxiety attacks on
the cold concrete floor of my workplace, my body
pulled to the ground by guilt and shame after hook-
ing up with a longtime male friend. Or a journal page,
folded away from even my closest friends, where
I’d written, “I feel as if sex is something I owe to my
partner — I’m not doing it against my will, but I don’t
understand how it’s supposed to make me feel.” Or
finishing a movie next to a boyfriend, wondering how
long I could watch the screensaver camera pan over
the Sahara before we’d have to go to bed. I felt defec-
tive. I shook during every physical interaction, a small
but noticeable tremble, and I told partners to ignore it.
And ignore it, we did. Following my friend’s exam-
ples, I tried everything to fix this part of me. I pined
after a friend for two years, went on an almost-blind
date that turned into a six-month relationship, even
initiated a friends with benefits situation during my
semester abroad (trying everything doesn’t quite lend
itself to originality). Each was manageable — which
isn’t the same as enjoyable.
I thought casual hookups would be empowering
— in a society that profits off women’s sexualization
through advertising but punishes them for taking
ownership of their bodies through sex work, casual
dating and hookup culture makes more sense. Wom-
en don’t need a relationship, which deems sex appro-
priate and private, to enjoy themselves. I’ll shout from
the rooftops about sex positivity, and actually have,
but it wasn’t helping me get anywhere.
***
I
never had a successful relationship in high
school, and I find it perplexing that some people
start college with zero relationship experience
and others come convinced they’d already found
their life partner. What an odd world to enter: By age
and education level college students are mostly on the
same page, but emotionally, we’re all over the map.
At 18, I was convinced I was emotionally and sexu-
ally stunted, and that was no way to enter college. The
spring of my senior year, a friend and I spent our after-
noon watching the girls’ tennis matches, then drifted
over to the risers next to the baseball field. She’d been
dating the same person for several years, and still is,
though we’ve lost contact. At the time, I found her
long-term relationship baffling and jealousy-induc-
ing.
“Isn’t a part of you, even a tiny part, just, like, inter-
nally screaming the whole time?” I asked.
“Uh,” she said, visibly confused. “No, I think that’s
just you.”
Right.
And before my mother makes a note in the margin
saying, You’re 18. Eighteen. Still in high school. Calm
down. I can’t help it. My brain stampedes forward,
content only when worrying over what I’m doing
wrong.
As I was heading into college and hookup cul-
ture, including casual dating, friends with benefits
and the inevitable “talking” stage my generation is
famous for, I didn’t know how any of it worked. For
me, it was more like watching a movie with my high
school boyfriend in our basement, my parents asleep
upstairs because they trusted me. They were right not
to worry — not because I was responsible, but because
I couldn’t cuddle with my own boyfriend without that
inevitable tremble. I felt afraid of something, but I had
no idea what it was.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
Nope.
***
Y
ears later, I spent a summer pandemic night
driving from Ann Arbor to St. Joseph. Tech-
nically, my body was controlling the car: my
right hand on the bottom of the steering wheel, my
left foot shoeless, propped up on the seat, knee resting
against the door. Some of my brain understood I was
on a highway, but most of it had checked out miles
ago, wandering off beyond my control. It was pictur-
ing a future — mine, apparently — but in the hazy,
slow-motion montage Hollywood adores. A highlight
reel had surfaced from my subconscious, ready to de-
but years of secret musings. The reel spun, revealing
scenes of my life, only with one key change: In every
scene, a woman was next to me.
A woman?
Aided by semi truck headlights and my own
anxiety, I tried to scrape my brain away from its own
movie. A woman? That doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t
name any woman that I’d been sexually attracted to,
any time during hookups I’d imagined that scenario
or any “sexual awakening” queer people laugh about.
And yet, the big picture made immediate sense. The
rest would follow, I assumed.
A woman?
I pulled into my parents’ driveway, parking my
Subaru in a tangible place I knew well, while falling
into an intangible world I’d accidentally unearthed —
a wonderland, still to be determined.
A woman? I turned the car off.
Well, shit. I guess I better do something about that.
***
L
ooking back, I’m not sure why I never consid-
ered I might be queer. Actually, I had thought
about it and reported to my mom that I was
“hopelessly straight” in a phone call we now laugh
about.
The idea that I could be someone else always ex-
isted, of course. I watched several friends from high
school disappear into their lives, deep in college or a
new city, before emerging with a same-sex partner.
Their initial Instagram photo, showing a happy cou-
ple, seemed to be posted with ease, taking its place in
a grid of photos peppered with ex-boyfriends. Later,
I went back to these people’s profiles, looking at the
thin white lines between their posts. That’s where the
real work lies: the therapy appointments, whiskey-
laced confessions of wanting to kiss girls, rehearsing
coming out moments, unpacking hookups with part-
ners that felt obligatory and quiet assumptions we
make based on what feels real.
The idea that I could be someone other than who
I’d always been was liberating, but mostly alarming.
I had 10 years of culture — social media, Hollywood,
the internet, music — teaching me how to think about
and pursue heterosexual relationships. I knew what
straight sex “looked” like when I was far too young.
I spent my teenage years learning what made me at-
tractive or unattractive, how to do my makeup to be
deemed pretty, what clothes can say about my body,
what to post on social media, what makes someone
“easy,” what makes someone desirable, what to do be-
fore, during and after sex and maybe the worst part:
that we’re supposed to enjoy it all. More than once, I
ended up on my therapist’s couch wondering what
was wrong with me. There was the physical aspect,
but also that internal scream I hadn’t yet figured how
to quiet.
In college, I put the knowledge to use. I followed
the rules. My old journals drone on for pages about
my body and letting other people see it, people who
weren’t picking it apart inch-by-inch but it didn’t mat-
ter. I’d do it for them. I’d long figured out how to dress
myself to cover everything I hated — years of scars
from summers spent outside paired with parts of my
body that just never felt right. I’ve spent a long time
with just myself, I wrote, not feeling like I need to have
my body ready for someone else. I turned the lights off
and kept my eyes closed.
I grew up in a world that sees women as a com-
modity, dispensable if not perfect. And I bought into
it, largely passively, letting it fester and rot my sense of
self into oblivion. I pressured myself into being palat-
able and desirable for others. I hear my mother’s voice
again. Annie, you’re 22. You can’t talk in the past tense
like you’ve got it all figured out — of course, I’m not
done. But naming it is the first step. And one day, all
those rules I was taught will be obliterated.
Except, all that knowledge I find completely toxic
had been my safe space for years. I hated that I knew
what I was “supposed” to do, but I also relied on it to
get me through six years of dating men.
I had no rulebook on how to date women, and for
once, I desperately wanted one.
***
I
ended up back on my therapist’s screen com-
plaining that I’d already gone through the years
of anxiety before my first time with a male part-
ner, and here I was doing it all again. I threw a tan-
trum in the privacy of my one-bedroom apartment,
read Glennon Doyle’s “Untamed,” and downloaded
TikTok, whose algorithm decided I was queer in
about ten minutes.
And I can’t lie, the miles of videos I scrolled
through helped. I hadn’t come out yet — I didn’t even
know what to come out as. But now I could learn this
new world. It involved several trips to Urban Diction-
ary as I learned the lingo and new Spotify playlists of
queer artists, kept secret. After a couple weeks, two
things grew: the fire under my ass and imposter syn-
drome.
I called one of my good friends, Olivia, who’d al-
ready walked this road. I like to say we met 15 years
later than we should’ve. She barreled into my life at
full force, a perfect mess of black curls and red lip-
stick, the confidence I only dreamed of having and
stories of ex-boyfriends in Chicago and Grand Rap-
ids, men who were years older, heartbreaks that had
shattered her. When she turned up one day with a
girlfriend, not one part of me was surprised. Liv does
what she wants.
“I think I might like girls,” I said, pacing around my
apartment, a glass of honey whiskey in my left hand.
The hazy image I’d seen on my drive was encouraging
but didn’t give me much to start with.
“Well, obviously,” she laughed. “I’ve known that
for five years.”
“What? What do you mean? Why didn’t you tell
me?”
“You had to figure it out for yourself!” she said, still
giggling. “I’ve been waiting!”
Are you f-cking kidding me.
Obviously, she was right — about both things. I
gave myself a few minutes to lament the past six years
of boy-induced stress, but it doesn’t take a therapist to
know that of course, I wouldn’t have ended up franti-
cally calling my friends, asking about women, asking if
it made sense, without those years.
Over the next six months, the pieces would start
falling into place. I did fall in love with someone. It
wasn’t easy, and it ended sooner than we both wanted.
But it was finally the right kind of hard, the kind Glen-
non Doyle wrote about. I spent two days straight with
her, and wanted more, when I’d once considered four
hours with a boyfriend too much. I’d find my hands in
hers or resting on her legs, always quietly reaching for
her. We discussed body image long before taking our
clothes off, savoring each other’s empathy. We ate din-
ner on the Chicago river, unpacking our internalized
homophobia. My scream quieted.
By mid-September, a safe distance after my I-94
awakening, I decided it was time to tell my parents.
It was mostly prompted by the large pride flag hang-
ing from the flower box outside. I’d ordered it in late
summer, feeling like I’d graduated to a new level in the
gay world. It came twice as large as expected, and I
was three nails deep in the layers of white paint before
realizing ripping it down was the only way to hide it.
So I called them.
While the phone rang, I typed a quick script into
my Notes app. Hi, Mom. I just wanted to let you know
I’m dating someone. Her name is Emma.
***
E
ven from the first realizations, I knew this step
would be much less painful than other peo-
ple’s. I’m incredibly lucky. My parents taught
me to work hard but also to play hard, that nothing
good ever happens after midnight and that inclusion
makes us better. But when your kid calls and com-
plains about being straight, then five months later
phones with the opposite message, a certain amount
of whiplash is permitted.
I’m not a parent, of course, but I do have two and
a decent prediction of how they’d react. My mother
taught me how to write, gave me a loud voice and
strong opinions and an expectation that I’d use them.
My dad taught me that the first step to solving most
problems is listening to music while drinking a beer
in the sun, our favorite activity. She had an idea of how
my life would go; my dad wanted me to be safe, secure
and happy. It took her a few minutes to mourn the life
she’d envisioned for me. I’d done the same, though in
the privacy of my own mind. The future I assumed
I’d inhabit, built by familial and societal expectation,
plus watching my friends graduate and move into the
world, following the rules we’re taught based on what
we decided is normal, no longer seemed so inevitable.
I’d like to think my mother realized that my hab-
it of incessantly questioning my surroundings and
pressing for better ones came from her. Something
like this was bound to happen. My dad never cared
who I brought home, as long as that person treated
me well and appreciated a good red wine. My parents
fell asleep upstairs because they’d put a good head
on my shoulders and trusted I’d use it to unlearn the
rules of the world we’d all grown up in.
Compulsory heterosexuality is a tricky thing. I’d
retreated from normal dating situations, believing I
was always better off alone, that something was fun-
damentally wrong, that it was my fault. I built amaz-
ing friendships with men I love dearly, but friendship
seemed to be all I was capable of.
In an ideal world, our lives would mirror the nar-
rative structure we’re taught in elementary school. Af-
ter that drive down I-94, I’d fall in love with a girl, my
body would relax, my brain would rest. I’d be normal.
When Glennon Doyle’s life took a sharp left turn,
she was more frustrated that her book’s plot had
been ruined than her life. In the past six months, my
scream has softened, but it didn’t disappear. I still
keep the lights off whenever possible. And every once
in a while, a tremble trickles out of my body, remem-
bering the years that it protected me.
Be here now, my therapist tells me. And I add: Take
up space. Trust your body. Nothing good ever hap-
pens after midnight (well, maybe 2 a.m, Dad). Ask
questions and be grateful for the answers — especially
when they’re not perfect.
BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT