Around this time three years ago, I wrote my first piece for Vertigo.
Anonymously.
Like I was, fucking, Bruce Wayne or something.
I remember reading it for the first time. I was freshly eighteen, and confused, with about six dating apps set to women, and sixty unanswered messages burning a hole in my left pocket. I had this odd sense that my piece wouldn’t make it in.
I only realised it had when I picked up a dust-covered copy of the issue months later. I flicked through the pages aimlessly on the train ride home, trying to pass the time. Funnily enough, the only reason I picked it up in the first place was because I thought a girl I had a crush on had written something for the mag.
(She hadn’t.)
And then, there it was. Pressed into pink pages. My name omitted, as I’d requested.
Anonymous.
When I wrote it, I felt so sure of myself. I’d chanted “you’re a lesbian” in enough mirrors, like some queer incantation— surely that was enough for one to appear?
Wrong.
Weeks passed, and that fateful L-word still caught in my throat like smoke.
My queerness has always been something I’ve known, innately. It’s funny, looking back now. Not at one big realisation, but at all the small moments that piled up like clues I was trying hard not to see. One of the earliest: a late-night sleepover, and I was talking with a girl, my soon-to-be first boyfriend’s sister. Her voice was curious in the dark: “Are you sure you’ve had a crush on a boy before?”
My mouth went dry. I palmed at blankets as I rifled through my class roll in my head, like some panicked raffle draw.
“Yeah. Uh… Haaaamish,” I landed on, sounding more like a question than an answer.
His name hung in the air like a thick fog. I waited for her to grab at it, accept it, and move on.
But she didn’t. She just sat there in the heavy silence. Maybe she’d fallen asleep, I thought. But I was so sure that she’d heard me. And she’d seen straight through the lie.
I’ve returned to that moment many times since.
I remember the first time I said the word out loud, how it left my mouth like a breath held too long underwater.
Lesssssbian.
It didn’t sound like freedom then. It sounded like grief.
In the years that followed, I tried to paint over it with borrowed colours. With boyfriends whose touch I endured like a change in the weather. I dated boys because it felt like something I was supposed to do. A kind of maintenance. A box to tick. Something inevitable, something joyless.
Everyone around me seemed to be born with this fluency in the language of attraction to men, so I assumed I just hadn’t learned it yet. I thought maybe I was late to the party. Maybe I’d find the right boy, and it would all click. That’s what the movies promised, at least.
So I kept trying.
Even when I hated the way he kissed me.
Even when I left dates feeling emptier than when I’d arrived.
Even when I felt my skin shrink away from his touch, like it was trying to tell me something I refused to hear.
I told myself I was being picky. Dramatic. Immature. I blamed the boys, not the premise. It’s definitely not that I don’t like men, I told myself. I just haven’t met the right one yet.
It’s strange how long you can live in that kind of denial. Hopeful, desperate, exhausted. Waiting for something to make sense that never will. I kept thinking my feelings would catch up if I just kept going through the motions. I imagined desire as a switch that would eventually flip, that love was a game of averages, and I just hadn’t played enough rounds.
But every kiss felt like a performance, every relationship a role I didn’t know the lines to. I clung to moments of tolerable intimacy like they were proof I wasn’t lying to myself. I tried to convince myself that the problem was timing, or chemistry, or him.
It never occurred to me that the problem might be me—or rather, that it wasn’t a problem at all. That I wasn’t broken, or late, or cold. Just... gay.
But that realisation didn’t come as a relief at first. It felt like losing something. A version of my future I’d been pretending to believe in. I had to grieve the life I never really wanted but had assumed I would grow into.
Still, beneath all of it was a slow, sinking truth: it wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was. I just couldn’t bear the consequences of knowing.
Internalised lesbophobia is quiet and careful. It doesn’t yell—it whispers.
Give it time.
Maybe you’ll grow into it.
Maybe you’re just scared.
It told me that being a lesbian was too much. Too sharp. Too stubborn. It promised me there was still time to be ordinary.
The second realisation wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was slower. Heavier. A gathering weight I could no longer ignore. I would wake up beside men and feel an absence so vast it echoed. I would watch women across a room and ache with a longing that felt ancient, familiar. My body had always known what my mind tried to reason away:
I didn’t want men.
I wanted women. Fiercely, tenderly, completely.
There was no grand ceremony. No fireworks. Only a quiet return to myself. Like pressing my palm against a door I’d locked years ago and finding that it, miraculously, remained unlocked.
I said the word again: lesbian. And this time, it didn’t catch. It settled.
Not as a declaration, but as something closer to a question that I’m finally willing to live inside.
It’s still uncomfortable sometimes. Jagged around the edges. Some days it feels like a home; other days, a hallway I’m still pacing through, waiting to see where it leads.
I wish I could end this with certainty. With triumph. But the truth is, I’m still figuring it out. What it means to say it, to mean it, to live it.
Maybe I always will be.
But at least now, I’m not pretending I’m someone else while I do.
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