God I'm tired. I haven't been sleeping well and I'm getting headaches. I am so tired my eyes are small and my face is puffy.

But Jeff's book post started me thinking, and I started writing this out there (not the health complaint bit- what I'm writing now) but I thought it was getting too long and anyway, if jeff has an opinion on me at all it's not a flattering one so I thought to myself, start your own damn thread if you will be self indulgent. Which I have and is this journal.

It's just that being out doesn't mean everything. You tell your family and your friends until it stops being something you tell and become this matter of public record, but really you can be out for years but still not quite get it.

I was gayer before I was out- whatever that means, and here it means less inhibited. I came out over the six months before I turned 16, and now I'm 19.

Before I told I adopted all these little markers of femaleness, in case the girls I'd never wanted to be like in the past decided I wasn't quite one of them, although I'd never been like them before. And most the habits I chose were improvements maybe, or just a part of growing up. I started shaving my legs and I grew out my hair and stopped wearing the non-underwired bras that came in multipacks and started caring about the clothes in magazines and learnt how to talk to boring girls about tinted moisturiser the most boring of all the cosmetics. And it's not that I regret any of this- talking to boring women is one of the most useful skills you can learn, since talking to boring men is easy as all you do then is let them talk- it's just I chose them deliberately to assimilate; so no-one could say that it was obvious I was a lesbian. However crudely stereotyped the markers were (short hair, sensible shoes), I didn't want to prove them true, but I also didn't want to be indentified by them.

It's what I was about to tell everyone I was, but the last thing I wanted to be.

And in the past four years I've had no female queer friends, no girlfriend, no sexual contact, barely even eye contact. And with my friends I am just a neutered straight girl. I don't want to make them uncomfortable- (and it does make them uncomfortable...)- I don't want to make myself uncomfortable- (... or maybe it doesn't, and it's my discomfort). Of all my friends only KD doesn't let me pretend to be a straight girl, and it's strange.

I felt treacherously overjoyed in the past when I was seen out with my ex-minus-the-boyfriend and people thought we were together. [an equally repressed gay boy I'd known as a child, met again at 6th Form and had a platonic, walking-the-dog-in-the-park-on-Sundays phase of quasi coupledom before an actual break-up and now we have to avoid each other on the bus]

I was getting agitated the other day, because I thought, what if this was a choice afterall? A choice I don't remember making, back when I was 12. Because I could unchose it. But it isn't really?

In a few months I'll be leaving home and then maybe, we'll see. I'll run in different circles hopefully.

You can be out and not out at all.

Anyway, although I doubted them I think the stupid all-natural herbal suppliment sleeping pills are actually working a bit and maybe I'll cheat insomnia if I go to bed now. Goodnight.