This will come as a shock to you, but you like girls. A lot. You like them that way. You like them every way, actually. Too soon? Okay, let’s start again.

Illustration by Nicole Rifkin

Maybe you remember Kelly. The seven-year-old brunette whom you adored because she was good at cartwheels and thought you were a boy. She was so convinced that she publicly mocked you when she saw you using the girl’s restroom at the YMCA, and for the first time in your life, you felt shame, but you wouldn’t understand why for many, many years.

Remember Jessica Perkins? The strawberry blonde with the quick wit and dirty mouth. You wrote 16-page letters to her several times a week, but it wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t close enough to her.

Even though you grew up in Arizona, where guns have more rights than people do, and where faith is primarily used as a weapon (not just against queers, but also immigrants, women, and people of color), you’ve had fleeting glimpses of lesbians. Your mother taught you about Two-Spirits. She also told you about lesbians who had a threesome with her boyfriend in college and broke up her relationship. Your best friend’s mom lived with a woman for a time, though no one said anything about their relationship, not even when her lover became abusive. You have suspicions about your favorite teacher and the “roommate” she always talks about, but because your school is so conservative, she will not come out to you until after you graduate. And you’ve seen the bar on Fourth Avenue with the pink triangle logo and wondered why all of its windows were painted over, why certain lives must be kept hidden, out of view.

Here’s the truth. There will never be stillness in your heart. This will work in your favor, though. Not for your happiness or well-being, but for your writing. It’s a good thing you’ve never had a different career aspiration, because otherwise, you’d be fucked.

Speaking of, let’s talk about the future. Can you turn off Dawson’s Creek for one minute? It’s important. Yes, the Jewel, too. That’s better. Okay, here goes: Everything you think you know about sex and desire is wrong. Sex is not something boys orchestrate and girls endure. Nor is it the hazy, romanticized spectacle portrayed so often on WB teen soaps.

I know that’s alarming to you because you took that driver’s ed/sex ed course in school for one semester and you know about three-point turns and how to protect a banana against STIs. Your poor, bedraggled teacher did her best with the limited, bare-bones curriculum, but she barely scratched the surface. She taught you fancy Latin names for your private parts — mons pubis, pudenda — but not why you felt such shame about them. (Years later you will learn that pudenda literally means “shameful parts” in Latin, and you will be pissed on behalf of genitalia everywhere.) Your teacher will not mention queer relationships or queer sex at all. And no one — not friends, not teachers, not magazines — has ever said anything about agency, boundaries, or even your own pleasure. These are words you will have to teach yourself.

You think you have a solid repertoire of “sex moves” gleaned from watching late-night, soft-core porn on Cinemax. But your sexuality up until this point is nothing but an amalgam of “Truth or Dare,” Smirnoff Ice, and glossy magazines that endlessly chided, “Everything about you is wrong!” You have been taught to fear sex even though you have not come close to having it, and will preemptively go on the pill for three years.

You will not have sex a single time while on the pill. Instead you’ll become depressed and gain 30 pounds. You will be miserable and lonely. So much so that a girl you barely know who sits next to you in class will set you up on a blind date. “Donnie is perfect for you,” she will say. This will be based on the fact that you have both attended a Dave Matthews concert.

You will meet Donnie and feel absolutely nothing for him. You will wonder what is wrong with you. Then you will see an ad for anal bleaching and remember, Oh right, everything. Everything is wrong with you.

So you will leave town for a while. And once you do, you will meet a beautiful girl with restless energy and eyes far deeper than her gaze.

You will drive for hours to a Motel 6 in the middle of the night, and, on stiff hotel sheets, this girl will kiss you in the darkness that holds your bodies that are no longer bodies and you will promptly fall into a space where you no longer have to justify your life.

In the morning, after you’ve parted, she will fall asleep at the wheel, drive her car into a ditch, and not speak to you for a month. When she finally does, it will be to ask if you want to go hiking with her and her new boyfriend.

You will spend the bulk of your adult life trying to overcome the crude perimeters of identity, sexuality, ethnicity. Friends and strangers will ask you to describe your sexuality in a word and it will take you a paragraph. Friends and strangers will assume you are white until you are standing next to your raven-haired, Native American mother. Then they will tell you how alike you look. People see what they want to see. On forms that ask for your race, you will check “Other” and marvel at the word’s perfect vagueness. You are attached to words because they are the only way you’ve ever made sense of the world. It will take you too long to realize some things can never be written down. You still try.

Your heart will be broken again and again, and each time you will love relentlessly.

You will come out of the closet only to find more closets waiting. You will try out words like bisexual, queer, dyke, and “labels are for canned goods.” You’ll realize that other people will always define you by the person you’re fucking, and learn to not put much stock in definitions.

But that will take years.

Before that, you’ll keep secrets, mostly from yourself. You will kiss girls and feel physically ill. You will loathe yourself and your desires. You will date a girl for months and tell no one. You will write an email to your soon-to-be-girlfriend with a bullet-point list detailing the reasons why you cannot be that way. One such reason, you write: “Lesbian sex is shallow!” You even foolishly think you can take your girlfriend on vacation with you and a guy friend and that he won’t find out about your house full of secrets.

In the dark hotel, you’ll tear at your clandestine girlfriend’s clothes, at the shame and isolation and self-revulsion that has been gripping you for years. “Put your mouth on me,” she will say, in a barely audible hum. And you’ll wonder then if touching her is a rebellion you don’t know is happening, an ecstasy moving so casually and so steady that it tricks you into thinking this is just the way it is, just your bodies tugging at each other in the night, just the dull edge of memory, of adolescence, of doubts falling away.

The next morning, your guy friend will be livid. He won’t believe that you could be stupid enough to think you could have sex with a woman in a bed three feet from him and that he wouldn’t notice. You apologize for not trusting him. And for having shockingly little foresight.

“I was scared,” you will tell him, tears pooling at your eyes’ crumbling corners. “I didn’t want to feel this way, but I do!”

“Hey,” he will say, reaching for you, softening. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

He will hold you as you start to cry, and you will tell yourself then that he is right.

You are, and would always be, okay. Nothing is wrong with you.

Best,

Anna

Click the response button below to write a letter to your younger self. Tag it with “LetsTalkAboutSexEd.” For more about why we think this is an important conversation and what Bright hopes will come out of it, read this.