Adishri

It started at 13, this strange pull towards a new girl in the apartment. Little did I know it was the beginning of a huge karma cycle for my sexuality. Now at 27, I have arrived at the truth that I may have never really been into women. But my trauma certainly was.

At first it was an ordinary friendship blooming at its own pace. I was fascinated to discover that I could be desired as a best friend. Until one day, we were on the swing in our community park sharing our ideas of friendship with other girls. She continued to say that hugging her friends in school was a way of showing love and strengthening a bond. I scoffed and said that we did no such thing at my school. It was absurd and unnecessary, or maybe I just didn’t consider anyone to be close enough to hug.

She looked at me with concern and said, “Wait so you’re telling me you’ve never been hugged by your friends?” and I shrugged. I was suddenly ashamed to admit that but something made me take it a step further and I said that I didn’t know how to hug a friend, or even hug. She choked out a pity laugh and urged me to remedy it immediately. She volunteered to be my first ever friendship hug and taught me how to do it whilst remedying this blockage in my life. It should’ve felt like the hug I gave my friends last week, or the hug I gave to a stranger I had a lovely chat with at the bar last year but it didn’t. My first hug with her felt like the start of an addiction that I’m attempting to rehabilitate from through these words. 

When she hugged me I was reminded of all the hugs I never received from my mother. Who should’ve held me even after I learned how to walk but she let go of my hand a bit too soon as she let go of her own identity. I understand my mother now with the compassion of a friend and as a woman when I realised that she became a mother out of compulsion and not desire. And today we hug with the interchangeable roles of being a mother, sister and best friend to each other, depending on what we need. But my first hug at 13 with my best friend turned an innocent need into an irresistible quest for intimacy.

I pursued countless best friends after the first to feel desired or for my body to even be touched. It never occurred to me that I specifically chose my straight girl friends as the target of my obsession with intimacy. Over the years I found out that this was also a part of the bisexual/lesbian awakening to fall for a straight girl and drown ourselves in confusion. That may be the case for many who have embraced their bisexuality/lesbian identity lovingly today but I think I had a specific type and that was straight women. Talk about mommy issues, huh?

I spent years trying to figure out, why straight women? Why make it harder for myself? What kind of self-imposed torture was this? I have dated women who identified as bisexual or lesbian as well but it shocked me to see that they seemed to take shape the same way. I found myself wondering, what energy am I really carrying into my dynamics with women that they all end up failing? It was no longer about the orientation, it was about the kind of women I was attracting based on what my trauma was seeking.

I imagined myself in a little scenario to have an outer body view of my life. I saw myself running away from a mother who terrorised the house with the voice of the devil. My house was a minefield of my mother’s emotions and I learned to walk on the tip of my toes with my voice chained to the back of my throat. I stayed out most days to stay out of trouble but found myself running towards trouble by chasing unattainable women who showed me breadcrumbs of affection. It’s ironic that I sought nicer versions of my mother in women who were also emotionally unavailable.

My friends never failed to warn me during my missions with women. They would say, “She’s just using you! She clearly likes you but doesn’t want to admit it! She just loves the attention you’re giving her! She doesn’t care about you.” And they were right, all of the time. But I continued to wait at the school gate for my crush’s parents to pick her up while I missed my bus ride back home. I continued to wake up at 6am for a cricket practice session because my crush was freakishly disciplined even though I wasn’t a morning person. All of this just to get a hug, hold hands or get a simple touch on my shoulder. You could say it’s pathetic but now that I look back, all my inner child’s body wanted was to be held.

As I grew older I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to just hug anymore. While it seems like I was on a hug-hunt from several women, the hormones raging in my teenage body blurred my vision at times. The core need might have been to feel loved and embraced by a woman who resembled my mother in some way but that’s how addiction works isn’t it? Once you get a taste of something, you want more. I became curious about the “more” and began doing some extensive research. My first best friend and I tried to explore layers of intimacy beyond our age but we failed because we weren’t mature enough. But with each experience, it started to become more of an indulgent performance to me. With a deep desire to please women just so I can feel loved at sporadic moments, I equipped myself with the skills and knowledge I needed to “press the right buttons” so to speak.

My immediate resource at the time was porn and you would think I dove into the lesbian sex genre but I didn’t. Apart from the fact that it’s mostly for the male gaze, I didn’t find it arousing enough. I didn’t find two women being together sexually arousing. I found it boring, slow and too gentle.

The consumption of porn did tamper the way I viewed sex with women. The best way to describe myself in my teens/early twenties is that I was an incredibly sweet and kind lady with the energy of a horny teenage boy colonising my sexual preferences. And when the time came to receive, I didn’t allow myself to feel anything. I was suddenly aware that my body is a woman’s body and I had no connection to it whatsoever. I masked the fear of being seen as a woman with the ego of my performance. I considered anyone who attempted to please me as unworthy and convinced my body to feel pleasure only through being the giver. And today I’m aware that it wasn’t ego, it was pain and the act of abandoning my own body that brought a stillness to receive any kind of pleasure.

The lack I faced programmed me to only feel a quick rush of intimacy after a lot of planted gestures and manipulation to work in my favour. With an urgency to feel the pain of my past just for a moment and release it with pleasure. I carried this urgency into most of my romantic entanglements with women because the older I got, the more my innocence and patience hardened. Much like the men I witnessed in a straight porn video who functioned like an aggressive drill trying to obliterate a hole.

It would be just cruel to say that I ached only for the sensual moments and that it was all part of a sex scheme. But my gentle soul never really allowed me to make a 15-minute naked video into the basis of my entire relationship with not just a woman but also a human being. I was a hopeless romantic, something in the smile of a woman for a sweet gesture I made would make me crumble.

It’s funny, I embodied what I should’ve received from my mother towards the women in my life because I was deprived of it. My entire personality transformed into a what-I-didn’t-receive-I-will-give masquerade and so I gave myself away. 

I gave myself away with a conscious effort to be their ‘boy crush done right’ and ‘man crush done perfect’. I killed the energy of the girl in me to be a boy and I killed the needs of a woman in me to be a man that women always dreamt of. I slaved with my actions to receive the attention I yearned for but my words always seemed to flow from my heart. Which was probably why the women I chased were so confused with me because I spoke sincerely and my service towards them was that of a gentleman’s. It was the perfect concoction of an endearing masculine energy with the heart of an empathetic woman.

But alas, I’m not a man, they were never really into women and perhaps I never wanted to see that they liked me for me. The games and fantasies I built and participated in were purely for entertainment. To escape facing the true form of trauma that stood firm at the end of the corridor while I entered numerous doors to the many faces of karma.

In an upcoming article, I will dive deeper into the phase in which I simultaneously embodied my father’s personality to cater to women. Or rather, the roles I played to acquire women by absorbing the behaviour my traumatised father displayed to win my emotionally volatile mother’s love.