GUEST BLOG POST | Violets Are Purple
Here at Hey Alisha, we love to encourage our amazing community of readers and followers to share their stories of inspiration, growth, love, etc. I’m so happy to post our first guest blog of 2020 from Miami native, Bianca, who opens up about her journey on finding and accepting herself. Check it out below!
Written by: Bianca Liu | March 3rd, 2020
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You have to love yourself to get anything done in this world,” Lucille Ball. Several years ago, this quote wouldn’t have resonated with me, but after the last three years, I can relate. I’m not particularly beautiful or funny as Ball once was, but I’m “special” as my daughter calls me, in my own way. I’ve lived for 35 years and 7 months, to be exact and can finally say that Ball was right, if you love yourself, anything can get done. The whole “loving yourself” movement wasn’t popular in the 1980s, I feel like that’s a more recent phenomenon that makes my heart happy. Hopefully, it will make a difference with our youth and instead of having coronavirus as the latest pandemic, acceptance will be contagious.
“I didn’t think that a girl with curly, frizzy hair would be someone that could accept themselves completely, or be the girl that people looked at as an example of confidence.”
Looking back, loving myself was always something that lacked, not because of any reason in particular, but because it wasn’t something that I thought about it. I didn’t think that a girl with curly, frizzy hair would be someone that could accept themselves completely, or be the girl that people looked at as an example of confidence. I thought there wasn’t a specific place for me in the world and that it was normal to feel that way. I made up stories in my mind of how I would like to be, how I would like to look and how I would like to be seen. None of these visions included people like me so I automatically assumed that I was different and would always feel that way, there was no way for me to be “normal.” Thinking about it now as an adult, what does being normal even mean? Are “normal” people the ones that make a difference? Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg “normal” as a girl, or did she always have a certain something that set her apart? I’m quite the opposite of RBG, but I’ve made an RBG scale difference in my own being. I finally faced myself, accepted a truth of myself that I knew I had to face at some point and made a change.
Like I mentioned before, I’ve known I was different ever since I was a little girl and I always felt I would never be quite understood. I knew I wasn’t “whole” (whatever that means) and that the puzzle pieces didn’t quite fit. I didn’t realize where a lot of these feelings were coming from until three and a half years ago. My daughter was born almost four years ago, and I truly believe that along with intense therapy and antidepressants, my strength comes from her. When I was in late elementary school/early middle school, my friends began to talk about boys. They mentioned cute boys and what they wanted their first kiss to be like. I participated in the conversations but never had a real interest in having a crush and didn’t dream about my first kiss with a boy. I thought about my first kiss, but the picture of who it would be with was never quite clear. My Catholic and conservative surroundings made it difficult to acknowledge that I wanted everything my friends talked about, but what I wanted was different. My parents were always accepting and liberal, but the people in my social circle influenced who I was and who I would become.
My first realization of who I was came in high school. I was a freshman and there was a beautiful girl, a senior, that made me feel a certain way. At that point, I acknowledged that I felt something, but I wasn’t sure quite sure what it was. I thought she was pretty, she seemed nice and she was the type of girl that had always intrigued me but I kept asking myself, what am I feeling? The first thing I knew is that I wanted to know more about her, I felt embarrassed about what I felt (I would have never dreamed of telling someone what I thought about her) and was ashamed of myself because of what I was feeling. Then came the key indicator, I needed a date for the upcoming Christmas formal and I didn’t want to take anyone but her. So many thoughts went through my mind, “Am I gay?” “How do I know that I’m gay?” “Can I still be straight and like a girl?” “What will people think if they find out?” “What do I think about myself?” “Would I ever come to terms with who I am?” I decided that the best answer to my questions was to ignore them and bury everything I had just realized. I did exactly that, I blocked it and went along with my life, taking a guy I didn’t know to the formal and pretending to feel comfortable and have fun. I buried the newfound information, deep into my mind and pretended to forget it.
“However, I decided to keep hiding it, fearing what it would mean if I liked dating women. ”
Fast forward several years later and I had managed to forget what I had buried. I know it’s hard to understand that I had forgotten about it, but I had. In college, my friends liked guys and went on dates, had relationships and planned futures together. When I had a crush, the idea of a relationship caused panic, if they would ask me out, I would get this sudden cold feeling in my body, it’s even hard to describe now, so many years later. After five years, several changes in my major and many research papers later, I graduated. After graduating in 2008, I relocated to Spain and even a continental change had no effect; my intense fear of being in a relationship persisted. I taught English while I was in Madrid and made a lot of wonderful friends, people I still talk to so many years later. Living in Spain provided the perfect circumstance for me to date a woman; I was away from my “real life” and unless I posted a photo online, no one would know. However, I decided to keep hiding it, fearing what it would mean if I liked dating women.
A little less than a year after I moved back to Miami from Spain, I met someone. He attended the same yoga studio that I did, and we started to get to know each other. We had a first date, a second one and were together for a year before he proposed, and I accepted. He proposed in May of 2014 and the church was booked for January, so I had seven and a half months to get ready. Like most newly engaged women, I quickly enrolled in exercise classes and began my “getting fit” regimen. I joined a gym and met one of the exercise instructors on the first day of class. That familiar feeling came back, the one where I find a woman appealing, and that little part of me that I had worked so hard to hide, began to crawl out of its hiding place. I continued going to the classes and although the extent of our conversations included how to do a squat correctly, that feeling came back. As I was driving home one night, I couldn’t stop thinking that the feelings I suppressed hadn’t gone away, I wanted to date a woman, that’s who I was meant to be with. However, I was engaged to a wonderful man, the white dress had been purchased and the cake had been ordered, it was too late to cancel the wedding and besides, I thought to myself, my feelings for women will disappear once I get married. My husband-to-be was one of the most wonderful people I had ever met.
“First, it was days, then weeks and then months, I just wanted for my gay to go away, “I didn’t choose this, why is this happening?” is what ran through my mind time and time again.”
A year and four months after getting married, came the happiest day of my life when I became a mom. My daughter was born healthy at just over six pounds and I was elated. I left my job and became a stay-at-home mom. I had a schedule I tried to stick to and on my checklist were to take walks twice a day; once in the morning before it got hot and, in the evening, once it was a bit cooler. While on my walks, I met someone that opened my eyes and made me feel like it was okay to be myself. We always spoke politics and she admitted to me that she was gay. I still don’t understand why she did, maybe she sensed that I was also gay and what I needed the most was for someone to tell me that it was okay and the catastrophe I feared was just that, fear, and it would be hard, but it wouldn’t kill me. I made up my mind to accept myself and the following days were some of the darkest I’ve ever had. I would cry in the shower, not just teary-eyes, but sobs. It was the only place where I could really let it all out, no one would hear my sobs through the running water. At night I would cry too, but I couldn’t sob at night because my husband would hear, so I cried silently and let my eye mask absorb my tears. First, it was days, then weeks and then months, I just wanted for my gay to go away, “I didn’t choose this, why is this happening?” is what ran through my mind time and time again. I felt my world was falling apart, I lived minute to minute, there was a time when I didn’t know if I was going to make it. After a couple of months of depression, my panic attacks began. First came the feeling of depersonalization, the feeling lasted for about 20 minutes and it was always followed by a panic attack. I would sit, sob and hyperventilate until the panic attack came to an end. It began happening once a week, but the frequency increased until I began to have them every day, and the severity increased as well. First, it started with stuttering, I couldn’t speak clearly after a panic attack and I would stutter for almost an hour. Once the stuttering started, my limbs began to flex and harden while I had the panic attack and it took some time for me to move my body again, until one day I collapsed. I was on an escalator and the tips of my fingers began to get tingly, then it moved to my toes and my legs, I handed my baby to the couple in front of me and lost complete control of my body and collapsed. After the collapsing panic attacks, I couldn’t speak, move, open my eyes or communicate in any way. When the paramedics got to me and asked me questions, I couldn’t tell them I understood what they were asking of me, that I could hear them speaking but that I just couldn’t respond. I suddenly felt tears streaming out of the corners of my eyes, and before I knew it, I began to sob, sobs that made my whole body vibrate while my anxieties, fears, and feelings of complete hopelessness played in my mind like a broken record.
“I could actually say that I was gay out loud, and it didn’t kill me. ”
As time passed, I felt like the only thing that would make me feel better was to die, nothing else could take these feelings away from me. I began to feel like a burden on my loved ones and I ultimately felt unlovable, no one would ever care for a sad, lifeless person like me. Thoughts of death and body-consuming panic attacks continued so I decided to get help; I had a daughter and I couldn’t be a mother the way I was feeling. I began taking anti-depressants, getting acupuncture, and going to therapy. I still remember that at the end of my first therapy session, my therapist told me that until I accepted my genuine self, my panic attacks wouldn’t go away. There’s a saying in Spanish, “Estaba entre la espada y la pared,” the literal translation is “in between a sword and a wall” but what it means is that I was facing two very hard realities, neither of which felt like a good option. However, I trusted my therapist and realized that what he was telling me was true, I had to make up my mind and after months of therapy, nightly meditations and daily gratitude lists, I reached a point where I accepted my sexual identity. I could actually say that I was gay out loud, and it didn’t kill me.
After a divorce, years of therapy and hard work, I got to the point where I accepted myself. The moment I came out to myself, I felt like a concrete wall had been lifted off my shoulders, I felt light and a happiness I had never felt before. I can’t quite put it into words what I felt, it’s that profound. I am one of thousands, there are many people like me going through this process and in many cases, their situations are more difficult. I’m well aware I have a wonderful support system that has stood by me, but not everyone is as lucky. As Ball once said, you need to love yourself in order for everything to fall in line and I am proof of how correct she was.