This week we welcome back Zama Gxarisa to Fluidthoughts. Hope you enjoy this cause damn, we sure did...
______________________________________
There is one universal truth that we all share: being a teenager is awkward. You thought I was going to say “avocados are trash” but that is a post for another day. For now, I’m going to talk about a queer problem no one warned me about.
Coming of age movies have displayed this topic enough for all of us to understand that it is difficult pursuing the opposite sex while you’re in your early teens. In fact, it’s a slippery slope from grade 7 up until early grade 11 (I’m generalising here). Everyone is trying to figure it out as they go along. Some of us take longer than others do. Shoutout to my Girls zaseGirls who would hold round table discussions during “downstairs”, this is where I got most of my training on how to play the man. What I wasn’t doing, however, was nursing my feelings for my fellow gender. Indeed, this is the plot twist. I won’t go into the reasons why I kept my sexuality to myself but in 2018 I found the courage to go “f*ck it” and just be myself. Obviously, this is limited to close friends and even closer, non-homophobic family; not to mention whoever follows me on social media. This is where I should end this off, but I’ve made a wild discovery in the past year:
I had to go through that teenage awkwardness all over again. You’d think that because I’m a woman I know what other women want, but you would be wrong. Men are, for a lack of a better word, easy. Once you’ve cracked the code, it is basically smooth sailing. You can have a 90% success rate. Women are more complex. We have ways that we’d like to be approached and if you’re not following that way then you might as well give up. You also don’t want to attempt flirting because if you suck, a woman will let you know because she probably doesn’t have time to endure your little audition. It doesn’t help that gwababa clutches my throat every time I have to speak to anyone I’m interested in. To make matters worse, I don’t know what women do when they like you so I’m missing any shots being thrown at me. If I had started going through this when I was younger, I feel like I would be better by now. I’m not saying that I’d be drowning in... options, but I wouldn’t be struggling to pursue my crushes. I would have already learned from my past mistakes. Now it feels like I’m 13-year-old me trying to flirt with grown women. Once I was unsure about what to do with a certain lady and I had to ask my older brother for girl advice. It was one of the oddest experiences of my life. His advice did work.
Hopefully, one day I shall be better at this. It would better if the love of my life just showed up, but that’s not how the game works. I’ll just power through the gwababa and pray that I don’t sound as awkward as I feel. Happy pride month to everyone. In the words of the Fab Five, “Cheers Queers”.