The first girl I was ever attracted to was someone I met on the first day of a new school when I was going into fifth grade. I’m pretty sure on the year but it could have been fourth. I was young.
She was a blonde with green eyes. And she had short hair — I thought she was a boy. I stared at her all day, thinking about how I wanted to talk to this new guy but he was sitting all the way on the other side of the room from me. And at one point I heard the teacher say her name and I remember the exact words I thought, “huh, I guess I like girls too.”
No flutter of shame or anxiety or hate, just a small thought in my head and then I was okay with it. I didn’t even know what gay or bisexual or even pansexual, the term I call myself now that I stumbled upon at the age of twenty three, meant. It was just a small realization.
I didn’t tell anyone until my sophomore year of high school, when I finally met and socialized with people who were likeminded. I’ve never told this story to anyone until writing it down here.
I mentioned not too long ago that I had a sinus infection that I couldn’t go to the doctor for. Well, when the rash on my hands started to spread drastically, I decided it was really time to go anyway.
Backstory: a few years ago, I got horrendous athlete’s foot that actually spread to my hands, and a year afterwards ended up with ringworm down my neck and chest. I had no idea what was causing this stuff, just that fungi seemed to have a natural affinity for my skin.
I tried treating the rash with athlete’s foot medicine, thinking it was some form of fungus. It wasn’t doing anything, so I was thinking the doctor just had to prescribe something stronger like what happened with the athlete’s foot I had on my hands. (That shit woke me up in the middle of the night because the itch was so bad. I spent so much time meditating on not scratching until I would break and scratch until my feet bled. It was not a good time and I was determined to not let it get that bad.)
The doctor confirmed that it is fungus (after calling in two of her colleagues, one to help and one to just gawk) and gave me some oral stuff to take for two weeks to kill it. When my friend Rob heard about it, he laughed and told me I was all moldy.
And then it finally clicked. As a child, I was taken to an allergist because I was pretty allergic to cats and they wanted to know what else made me sick. The things that broke me out the most on the skin test were cats, pollen, and mold. I had just not equated mold with fungus! So this must be why the fungus that doesn’t effect Dan causes me to break out in blisters and rashes everywhere.
It’s good to know.
