PRIDE: THERE’S ALWAYS A FIRST
As I sit in my van, under a rainy, Portland sky, I write this Pride blog and I think about how interesting life is in its twists and turns. I reflect on my story and what piece of it I feel compelled to share today, and the uncertainty that comes with trying to accurately discover who you are.
Truth be told, sometimes I feel guilty sharing my story. Realistically, there are more deserving stories. Voices that need to be heard - and won’t be. Voices that are worthy of the platform I have the privilege to share on here. It causes a stirring guilt, though I remind myself that my story too is relevant in its own regard - that there is another woman out there, 22 or so, who is likely grappling with the same uncertainty and confusion that I felt in 2011 when I met her. And the ensuing eating disorder I used to cope with it, too.
Recently, on the Instagram site “Upworthy”, a series of photographs were posted specifically honoring gay men throughout the years. Gay men in the 1920s, stolen pictures of men loving one another, lying next to each other in bed reading the newspaper.
I think about how difficult that must have been to be those men, then. How ‘wrong’ they must have felt at times. All I’ll ever have to compare it to is my own experience: a 22-year old white female with an eating disorder living in suburban Texas. A debutante. Sorority girl. Even a Fraternity sweetheart one year. An Ann Taylor-buttoned cardigan-wearing, diamond earring studs reflecting in the sun type of young 20s insecurity.
While I’ll never ‘get it’ for those men, I do know what it is to turn against the fray of who you’re positioned to be. And how much pain that can cause. How it can help lead to addiction and lead to eating disorders, as was the case with mine.
I think about how hard it’s been over the last 10 years to “come out” to my family and friends - even now, with the backing of the media, the majority of Americans, and the hip mainstream shows that make sure to plug in a LGBTQ+ character or two.
And how hard it must’ve been for those men to love each other then, amidst that unsafety, concern, confusion, and pain of society’s relative disgust and unacknowledgement of the most basic, natural, encompassing, human feeling we possess: love.
I think about Emma.
And how Emma came into my life on a grey day in Spain in 2011.
How she was funny and smart – and maddening.
Mostly, she was beautiful.
And I loved her.
I would come to love her very much.
And how conflicting that love felt then, unraveling everything. I dissect it over and pick it apart in my mind still, late at night, driving the van on a lonely highway. A water bottle in my lap and The Cure’s “In Between Days” drifting from the speakers, out the rolled-down window and into the PNW sky. And how The Cure reminds me of her, and the way she finger-drummed on the wheel of her car when we drove.
I think about that first love, though I’ve dated and loved since. I think about her even when the novelty of my own sexual identity wore off and I accepted who I was, and the vast range of human beings I find attractive, or can fall in love with.
But, she was the first. And as such, the first of anything - unknowingly - seems to become a symbolic figure of whatever feelings that ‘first experience’ brings. In turn, she is now the symbolic human that challenged every single belief I’d been told about myself at 22 - coming from a religious, southern background.
No, I certainly did not go looking for this identity mayhem then, but there she was: a 5’6, long-legged, grey-jean wearing human with a black blazer, standing there in my spanish class looking awfully uncomfortable as the gaze of the class fell on her when the door shut behind.
In the beginning, she stirred something in me, my sunglass-shielded eyes constantly floating to her when sat around the cafe tables after class: her hands flying in the air as she told a story and everyone laughed. I decided it was her confidence - and that amidst my own, festering and ever-present eating disorder, her (seeming) bravado about herself and being lesbian endeared me to her.
Later, when we began to speak directly, I found myself stumbling over words - a novelty for my extroverted self. My eyes darting from meeting hers when she looked at me. What was this hang up? I wondered, late at night, the fan in my au pair room circling humid air.
Eventually, we grew close over Spanish conjugations and park hang outs. Late night Skype conversations from our respective Spanish au pair homes. Sharing stories of our countries - the UK and US. Shared snarls over Bush. One day, she sat next to me at the cafe after class. “Vanilla latte with soy?” she asked, placing a coffee in front of me. I smiled. She memorized my order. Within weeks, we texted daily.
We’re best friends, I decided, though neither of us ever said it. “She’s my girlfriend, mate, p*ss off,” Emma would yell to the drunk men in the street harassing us. Even though it wasn’t true then, I beamed. “You Texans gotta stand up for yourself,” she’d say. And I’d grin.
One night, far too late in the evening, I held her hand in a taxi cab. Another night, in the back alley of a street in Seville, a cigarette hanging from her mouth: “I love you y’know,” she said. “I love you, too,” I whispered, my back against the opposite wall. We didn’t talk about it the next day.
But a few weeks later, with both our parents ironically visiting at the same time: a dinner where they all met. Emma and I smirking to one another across the table. Her British mother’s poise and grace and my dad’s boisterous Texas accent:
We stopped being friends that evening, unbeknownst to all of our parents. And that’s a story I keep for us.
For a year, we did everything together in Europe. I was in love, my hands on her face in pictures, late nights with Talking Heads “This Must Be The Place” on the record player in her Manchester, UK flat, and train rides to London, my head on her shoulder. Even then, in those moments, I knew I would miss her. And I would miss her someday forever, though I never told her that then. In the back of my mind: “one day, I’ll leave. And I will leave her. Because I will never be this person at home.”
It exacerbated every quality of my eating disorder - to live one life knowing I wouldn’t keep it, even if I was happy.
I think about the selfishness I inflicted on Emma to protect myself. And how terrified I was of life changing if people knew. I think about how I believed - and in some instance, still do - that if I were truly open, and forced my family to talk about it and not just hear it, I would lose my parents.
I think about how I loved her, and I knew it. I couldn’t deny such a basic human emotion. But how I didn’t want to love her, too. And how the two lived in tandem together after awhile. And I couldn’t decipher which was more powerful, which I then took out on myself with alcohol and eating disorders.
Mostly, I think about how ridiculous the antiquated narrative is that LGBTQ+ people would ever choose to put themselves through such painful experiences like mine “for attention” if it wasn’t that something so deeply woven into the fabric of our being desires to love the humans we love. And that man, woman, nonbinary, none of that really matters - not when it comes to loving another.
Love is simply - just love. The universal emotion that can never be universally defined.
Years later, when it was all over and I was writing freelance, I'd publish a piece about sexuality and I’d write about Emma. And I’d write that in my experience, you really have no way of knowing which ordinary days will someday feel important.
And no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.
Ten years ago, Emma changed the nature of my life in a manner of seemingly irrelevant and ordinary encounters. She challenged everything I thought I knew about myself, and ultimately her existence changed my entire way of being.
We would break each other's hearts in the explosive way first experiences like this do. I wouldn’t commit and I left her no choice - though at the time, I was selfishly filled with rage when she left.
I think about how in the mix of all the confusion of my early 20s, Emma was ultimately the heartache that helped exacerbate the eating disorder to an unmanageable place. I was suffering and I didn’t know how to talk about it, so I suffered with an eating disorder as a means of combating the shame, anxiety and general sense of lostness I felt then.
Ultimately, the whole experience led me to treatment, recovery, and now - to blogs like this. And I have her to thank for that.
She was a risk I had yet to understand the day I met her, and risky people are labeled as such because they come with either great consequence or great reward. With Emma, I ultimately am left with both.
The reward is her memory.
The consequence is that she existed in the first place, but no longer in my life for me to appreciate.
For all of those things, I am forever inclined to feel gratitude to her. Talk about her. And think of her on Pride.
Lindsey Hall (she/her) is an award-winning LGBTQ+ eating disorder recovery speaker and writer. Focusing on what she refers to as "the nitty gritty topics often not discussed, Lindsey has been in active recovery since 2014 and is the author behind "I Haven't Shaved in Six Weeks," an award-winning blog written to humanize the stigmas of eating disorders, treatment, addiction, and recovery. Through her writing, she has had the privilege of speaking around the world on nuanced topics such as LGBTQ+ and Eating Disorders, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Drunkorexia, Exercise Addiction, Orthorexia and more. She has been featured in publications including TODAY Show, CBS, Washington Post, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, SheKnows, NEDA, SHAPE Magazine, Refinery29, Recovery Warriors, etc. Currently, she resides in her converted van and is touring around the U.S. with her little kitty, Smudges, writing and blogging about life on the open road in recovery.