When I was younger, I felt like everyone was going to some sort of party I wasn’t invited to when it came to sexual attraction. Everyone around me going through puberty suddenly seemed to know all these things about their bodies and about how bodies worked, and I was sitting in class trying my best to pretend like I had a clue what was going on. It was like everyone got this invitation to start experiencing sexual attraction, but I might as well have been Gretchen Weiners; my candygram wasn’t coming.
My body wanted to be explored, and I wanted company — but I didn’t know why I wanted it other than to satisfy my curiosity. Everyone was talking about sex, everyone was having sex, everyone was saying on TV and in movies and in books how great it was, how it was this ultimate expression of love, how nothing could be as good as sex. That sounded good. I wanted that. Well, not that exactly — but something like that. The party sounded fun because everyone was so excited about it, and I didn’t want to feel left out.
I wanted an invitation to the party more than I can really say. I just wanted to fit in, and I didn’t really know how to do that.
When I was fifteen, I got invited to the party, this mythical place where people had sexual attraction, and I kept coming back to it because I wanted to belong somewhere. Maybe I was searching for an identity and I didn’t know where else to find…
