The grief is real. I am a 31 year-old woman married to a man with three kids. My husban is my first ever relationship. Prior to this i never really had a crush on or fancied boys. I liked that they liked me but that was it. I never considered this a problem because my culture having nothing to do with boys meant you were a "good girl with good upbringing".My husband and i met at the University he was 21 and i was almost 19. I didn't feel that intimacy with him, but i like that he liked me. To make things even beter both our families loved us. This made things easier. By they way we both come from the same country in Africa. I travel out of the country when i was 19 and we reunited a year later when he joined me. I never paid much attention to the fact that i never could feel intimate with him. I blamed it on the fact that i was inexperienced with men. Not long after we reunited i got pregnant for our first child. So i blamed my lack of intimacy on pregnancy homones. As time went by it became more obvious that there was a problems with our sex life specifically from me, but i blamed it on having a low libido. What i never told my husband was that this problem went beyond just sex. I just have never and could never feel intimate with him or have any attractions for him now matter how i tried (and God knows i tried) as time went on got pregnant for our second and not long after for our third child. By this time i had accepted there probably was something wrong or broken inside me that made me incapable of feeling attracted to my husband even though he is the best husband and father to our kids i could ever ask for. We are also Christians and my faith is really important to me. So when all this was going on i prayed and fasted to no avail. This lasted almost 10 years ( my husband and i are now 12 years together) After the birth of our third child i gave up and accept that this was probably my fate. 2 years ago i started a new job, where i met this girl (she's a lesbian). The first time i saw her i literally heard something inside me say "there she is" and "and she is beautiful". You know that feeling you get when you finally find something important you've been searching for, but only i honesty wasn't searching. Despite my situation with my husband i never once considered looking else where.so this was a complete surprise to me. It's like i something in me recognized her like i have know her before even though this was my first time ever seing her. I have never been curious about someone before like i was with her. I wanted to know everything about her but most importantly and strangely i just wanted to know if she was happy. I was somehow really personally invested in her happiness. As time went on the feelings i felt kept getting stronger and also became sexual. For the first time in my life i found someone sexually attractive. For the first time in my life i realized i had built up a wall with other other. I didn't easily let people in but i always thought that meant i was "emotionally matuered". It's like this girl just walked right through into my heart, effortlessly. It was my heart had a password and she knew what it was. I could not shake the feeling she also felt something for me. But for my sanity i have settled on maybe i waa just being delusional. we work together, and she is already in a relationship so i told myself not to even hope but i can't get her out of my head. It's been close to two years now. While all this was going on i was also freakingout and spending nights crying none-stop. I have feelings for a woman, what does this make me? How do i tell my husband? What happens to my family? I had a million questions but i decided not to act on or tell anyone anything. Not the girl at work about my feelings for her and not my husband. Luckily this girl got a different job at a different location. I was initially happy because i thought this meant out of sight will be out of mind but that doesn't seem to be the case for me. It's been 4 months since she left and i still think about her every single day. My husband read my Journal on new years day and it's safe to say this was more than devastating. Everything is weird. I feel like i dont know who i am anymore. I feel so angry and frustraed at myself. How could i not have known all these years, it could have saved a lot of people a lot of heart ache. My family seems to think i have simply been possessed by the devil and that i need to be delivered. I just want to dig a whole and hide or disappear, but i can't do that to my kids. The future has never seemed so Scary and blique like it is right now.
I am so sorry, at a time as confusing as this you deserve at the very LEAST to have supportive people around you. The fact that your family can't show up for you makes everything harder. It isn't your fault you didn't know sooner. You can only understand what you have language and references for. I'm sorry the process has been so full of pressure for you 💙💙
My therapist told me this when I told her I regretted marrying a man and that I should have married a woman when I was younger. She told me “you don’t know what or how it would have turned out had you done that”. We don’t know the woulda coulda shouldas…I knew I loved women from an early age…but I didn’t feel “safe” expressing myself. I grieve a lot that I didn’t take the bull by the horns and just be myself, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. I’m in that void you speak of, kinda stuck in the past, kinda looking forward, but being in neither place at the same time. Being an authentic lesbian but not knowing where to go with it. Never having frolicked in lgbtq spaces, or having any gay friends. It’s all so foreign to me. I’m 69 years old and pray one day I will find a partner…meanwhile I’m slowly looking into connecting more with people in general hoping it will lead to new experiences. Your channel addresses so many of our unique concerns. I appreciate you!
For me it helps that I do recognize I wasn't ready anyways. The past years that I now grieve, were also the years that I grew to a whole different person, with the person that's not the right one for me, but was what I needed while I grew. Even if I was realizing my sexuality when I was a teen, I wouldn't have been ready, because I needed to heal otherwise first 🙏 The biggest problem for me, is that letting go of the safe and comforting life I've built with a wonderful person, just to start building again 😔
I'm really enjoying this because what you are talking about about applies to me as a person with Asperger's/HFA. After spending most of my life trying to be "normal" and hide my different way of thinking and living, I've decided to embrace it now in my 40's. And I do acutely feel a sense of wasted time when I look back at a lifetime of being the square peg in a round hole. I'm trying to believe the notion that I didn't waste those years, but rather spent them gaining knowledge and experience I can use today
I've only just recently realized it's okay for me to claim the identity of bisexuality as someone in a happy, long term heterosexual relationship. And I'm experiencing so much grief about the years of internalized homophobia that had me compartmentalize my homosexual attractions to such a degree that I've never once allowed myself to be interested in any woman I've known. I don't think I've wasted time because I lucked out and married a really great guy and have two great kids. It's just a lot to come to terms with, realizing there's this whole aspect of your personhood that you completely cut off and denied. I have a lot of grief for the girl who was taught to feel shame and fear hell for the things she felt.
It IS a lot to come to terms with. I am sorry you were ever made to feel as though that part of you was unacceptable. You didn't (and don't) deserve that 💜💜
I sometimes think this but other times just remind myself that my upbringing and peers moulded me into behaving who I was and burying any same-sex attraction. It only surfaced again in my mid-twenties and I was in complete denial for so long, living joint public heterosexual and secret homosexual lives for a quarter of a century. Only recently have I finally accepted that I am gay and will at some time in the future when it feels right, come out. But there's no point regretting your life. At fifty years old it is time to move forward, not waste my time looking backward.
Im so happy you made a page to share your expertise for free to people like me who need it. I grew up in a cult essentially that discouraged education, and only straightness. Im in community college working on fixing those "lost" years. Sometimes the grief will hit me, but I'm actively trying to get to a better position for myself. One day I'll be able to afford therapy but in the meantime thank you for these helpful points!❤❤❤❤❤
Thank you so much for this. It's SO hard to find any practical information on this topic. This comes at a perfect time for me. I've spent the entire last week deep in this process (these waves of grief have hit me intermittently for years and have finally come to a head). I am finally starting to see that this grief keeps coming back because I have been scared to move forward in certain ways that I probably need to. The best way to honor the loss of the past is probably to live as fully as I can in the present.
I've struggled with "making the correct decision" for most of my life. It's a thought process inflicted on me both by my evangelical upbringing and my time in the nuclear navy. Both high demand organizations with very prescribed "right" and "wrong" actions. This gave me a sense that there's always a correct decision to make, with the corollary if I don't pick the correct option, I'm a bad person. I came out and finalized my divorce July 2024 at the age of 46. In the months since, it has become much easier to shed that binary thinking. I can make decisions much more easily now. I reflect on my past and I would have liked to transition while still in puberty, for the hips. But I'm cognizant of how even worse it was for women then, and that my parents would likely have sent me to a conversion camp, and in no way be affirming, and that tempers my feelings. I think I transitioned when it was right for me.
I don't feel wasted time so much as I look at the past and see my past self from a different lense and see the signs of who I was. I didn't know then I was Bi. It wasn't even a term used much back then and def not in xtian circles and def with only negative connotations. The most recent example: I just watched 12th Night again recently (film of the play from the 90s) and it was one of my favorite movies back then. Now I can see why I identified so much with it at the time. Its so queer!
We blame our flaws--fear, anger, selfishness, stubbornness--for wasted time (I have & I've heard many do it) but maybe we've wasted the most time where we socially succeeded the most? The more kind and empathetic and 'normal' we've been, the better resource we've been to others--at our own expense. Society often denies personal boundaries. It's easy to notice how we diverge from the norm & miss what 'normal' is actually doing.
The grief is real.
I am a 31 year-old woman married to a man with three kids. My husban is my first ever relationship. Prior to this i never really had a crush on or fancied boys. I liked that they liked me but that was it. I never considered this a problem because my culture having nothing to do with boys meant you were a "good girl with good upbringing".My husband and i met at the University he was 21 and i was almost 19. I didn't feel that intimacy with him, but i like that he liked me. To make things even beter both our families loved us. This made things easier. By they way we both come from the same country in Africa.
I travel out of the country when i was 19 and we reunited a year later when he joined me. I never paid much attention to the fact that i never could feel intimate with him. I blamed it on the fact that i was inexperienced with men. Not long after we reunited i got pregnant for our first child. So i blamed my lack of intimacy on pregnancy homones.
As time went by it became more obvious that there was a problems with our sex life specifically from me, but i blamed it on having a low libido. What i never told my husband was that this problem went beyond just sex. I just have never and could never feel intimate with him or have any attractions for him now matter how i tried (and God knows i tried) as time went on got pregnant for our second and not long after for our third child. By this time i had accepted there probably was something wrong or broken inside me that made me incapable of feeling attracted to my husband even though he is the best husband and father to our kids i could ever ask for.
We are also Christians and my faith is really important to me. So when all this was going on i prayed and fasted to no avail. This lasted almost 10 years ( my husband and i are now 12 years together)
After the birth of our third child i gave up and accept that this was probably my fate.
2 years ago i started a new job, where i met this girl (she's a lesbian). The first time i saw her i literally heard something inside me say "there she is" and "and she is beautiful". You know that feeling you get when you finally find something important you've been searching for, but only i honesty wasn't searching. Despite my situation with my husband i never once considered looking else where.so this was a complete surprise to me. It's like i something in me recognized her like i have know her before even though this was my first time ever seing her.
I have never been curious about someone before like i was with her. I wanted to know everything about her but most importantly and strangely i just wanted to know if she was happy. I was somehow really personally invested in her happiness. As time went on the feelings i felt kept getting stronger and also became sexual. For the first time in my life i found someone sexually attractive. For the first time in my life i realized i had built up a wall with other other. I didn't easily let people in but i always thought that meant i was "emotionally matuered". It's like this girl just walked right through into my heart, effortlessly. It was my heart had a password and she knew what it was. I could not shake the feeling she also felt something for me. But for my sanity i have settled on maybe i waa just being delusional. we work together, and she is already in a relationship so i told myself not to even hope but i can't get her out of my head. It's been close to two years now.
While all this was going on i was also freakingout and spending nights crying none-stop. I have feelings for a woman, what does this make me? How do i tell my husband? What happens to my family? I had a million questions but i decided not to act on or tell anyone anything. Not the girl at work about my feelings for her and not my husband. Luckily this girl got a different job at a different location. I was initially happy because i thought this meant out of sight will be out of mind but that doesn't seem to be the case for me. It's been 4 months since she left and i still think about her every single day.
My husband read my Journal on new years day and it's safe to say this was more than devastating. Everything is weird. I feel like i dont know who i am anymore. I feel so angry and frustraed at myself. How could i not have known all these years, it could have saved a lot of people a lot of heart ache.
My family seems to think i have simply been possessed by the devil and that i need to be delivered.
I just want to dig a whole and hide or disappear, but i can't do that to my kids. The future has never seemed so Scary and blique like it is right now.
I am so sorry, at a time as confusing as this you deserve at the very LEAST to have supportive people around you. The fact that your family can't show up for you makes everything harder. It isn't your fault you didn't know sooner. You can only understand what you have language and references for. I'm sorry the process has been so full of pressure for you 💙💙
My therapist told me this when I told her I regretted marrying a man and that I should have married a woman when I was younger. She told me “you don’t know what or how it would have turned out had you done that”. We don’t know the woulda coulda shouldas…I knew I loved women from an early age…but I didn’t feel “safe” expressing myself. I grieve a lot that I didn’t take the bull by the horns and just be myself, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. I’m in that void you speak of, kinda stuck in the past, kinda looking forward, but being in neither place at the same time. Being an authentic lesbian but not knowing where to go with it. Never having frolicked in lgbtq spaces, or having any gay friends. It’s all so foreign to me. I’m 69 years old and pray one day I will find a partner…meanwhile I’m slowly looking into connecting more with people in general hoping it will lead to new experiences. Your channel addresses so many of our unique concerns. I appreciate you!
I appreciate you watching! 💚💚💚
For me it helps that I do recognize I wasn't ready anyways. The past years that I now grieve, were also the years that I grew to a whole different person, with the person that's not the right one for me, but was what I needed while I grew. Even if I was realizing my sexuality when I was a teen, I wouldn't have been ready, because I needed to heal otherwise first 🙏
The biggest problem for me, is that letting go of the safe and comforting life I've built with a wonderful person, just to start building again 😔
That is such a hard transition 💙💙
I'm really enjoying this because what you are talking about about applies to me as a person with Asperger's/HFA. After spending most of my life trying to be "normal" and hide my different way of thinking and living, I've decided to embrace it now in my 40's. And I do acutely feel a sense of wasted time when I look back at a lifetime of being the square peg in a round hole. I'm trying to believe the notion that I didn't waste those years, but rather spent them gaining knowledge and experience I can use today
🧡🧡🧡
I've only just recently realized it's okay for me to claim the identity of bisexuality as someone in a happy, long term heterosexual relationship. And I'm experiencing so much grief about the years of internalized homophobia that had me compartmentalize my homosexual attractions to such a degree that I've never once allowed myself to be interested in any woman I've known. I don't think I've wasted time because I lucked out and married a really great guy and have two great kids. It's just a lot to come to terms with, realizing there's this whole aspect of your personhood that you completely cut off and denied.
I have a lot of grief for the girl who was taught to feel shame and fear hell for the things she felt.
It IS a lot to come to terms with. I am sorry you were ever made to feel as though that part of you was unacceptable. You didn't (and don't) deserve that 💜💜
I sometimes think this but other times just remind myself that my upbringing and peers moulded me into behaving who I was and burying any same-sex attraction. It only surfaced again in my mid-twenties and I was in complete denial for so long, living joint public heterosexual and secret homosexual lives for a quarter of a century. Only recently have I finally accepted that I am gay and will at some time in the future when it feels right, come out. But there's no point regretting your life. At fifty years old it is time to move forward, not waste my time looking backward.
I love your perspective on this 💛💛
Im so happy you made a page to share your expertise for free to people like me who need it. I grew up in a cult essentially that discouraged education, and only straightness. Im in community college working on fixing those "lost" years. Sometimes the grief will hit me, but I'm actively trying to get to a better position for myself. One day I'll be able to afford therapy but in the meantime thank you for these helpful points!❤❤❤❤❤
Thank you so much for this. It's SO hard to find any practical information on this topic. This comes at a perfect time for me. I've spent the entire last week deep in this process (these waves of grief have hit me intermittently for years and have finally come to a head). I am finally starting to see that this grief keeps coming back because I have been scared to move forward in certain ways that I probably need to. The best way to honor the loss of the past is probably to live as fully as I can in the present.
We definitely carry those other versions with us either way, right? The honoring of ourselves is a great frame for that 💜💜
I've struggled with "making the correct decision" for most of my life. It's a thought process inflicted on me both by my evangelical upbringing and my time in the nuclear navy. Both high demand organizations with very prescribed "right" and "wrong" actions. This gave me a sense that there's always a correct decision to make, with the corollary if I don't pick the correct option, I'm a bad person.
I came out and finalized my divorce July 2024 at the age of 46. In the months since, it has become much easier to shed that binary thinking. I can make decisions much more easily now.
I reflect on my past and I would have liked to transition while still in puberty, for the hips. But I'm cognizant of how even worse it was for women then, and that my parents would likely have sent me to a conversion camp, and in no way be affirming, and that tempers my feelings. I think I transitioned when it was right for me.
I'm so glad that ultimately the timing you had was right for you and you know that 💚💚
Thank you so much
Thank you for watching 🩷🩷
That point about age limits hits home. People always say this to me as 35 year old when i feel like i wasted the easiest years of being gay.
I don't feel wasted time so much as I look at the past and see my past self from a different lense and see the signs of who I was. I didn't know then I was Bi. It wasn't even a term used much back then and def not in xtian circles and def with only negative connotations. The most recent example: I just watched 12th Night again recently (film of the play from the 90s) and it was one of my favorite movies back then. Now I can see why I identified so much with it at the time. Its so queer!
That hindsight, when everything looks so much clearer, is intense sometimes 💛💛
You are amazing
Thank you so much for watching 💜💜
Can i be bisexual but not fancy another gender just men and women and Their need be flag for just fancying both boys and girls no else
You can like whoever you like 💛
We blame our flaws--fear, anger, selfishness, stubbornness--for wasted time (I have & I've heard many do it) but maybe we've wasted the most time where we socially succeeded the most? The more kind and empathetic and 'normal' we've been, the better resource we've been to others--at our own expense. Society often denies personal boundaries. It's easy to notice how we diverge from the norm & miss what 'normal' is actually doing.
Is being a resource to others always at our own expense? Genuinely wondering your take, not trying to be cagey 💙💙
I think you're so awesome for again being sound, reasonable and comforting in your topics and videos. Hugs.
She is isn't she! 🥰
Thank you 💙💙💙