Letters to the Editor
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There is hope.
Very simply, after reading this letter, and having dealt with OCD for all of my life as well, I cannot recommend enough dealing with the OCD directly. Please see someone specifically for OCD, and consider starting medication to make things easier. It's not an easy road, but suffering from obsessive thoughts and being compelled to perform certain actions is even worse. I'm not professionally trained, but when I read this letter, I saw so much of my own life in it, I needed to reply. Reading this it just seems like OCD is problem here, and working on the OCD is is what is going to help. What will not work is finding out you're not gay, getting rid of this one obsession. It will just lead to another obsession that will hit harder than the previous one.
It seems to be that OCD is the problem here, and OCD is very treatable, please, please see someone about it.
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OCD works in mysterious ways
The fear you described was awfully familiar to me, too. I've had OCD for a long time--probably since early childhood.
I was surprised that you identified your list-making as a symptom of the OCD, but not your fear of being gay.
I have a book about OCD by Fred Penzel; it's called, "Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders." Describing a subcategory of obsessive thoughts that involves sexual obsessions, Penzel writes,
"Often, thoughts in this particular subcategory of sexual obsessions will only involve the repetitive question, 'How do I know I'm not a homosexual?'--a question which no amount of reasoning can remove. ... The fact that the sufferer has never shown any homosexual tendencies or behaviors makes no difference in the face of these strong doubts. These types of obsessions do not appear to be strictly limited to heterosexuals. I have had homosexual patients troubled with obsessive thoughts about being straight. ... [S]uch thoughts do not result in the individual acting them out" (p. 215-216).
So I'd recommend getting treated for the OCD. I'm no longer in therapy; I find that taking medication works well enough for me.
--Molly
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I came out to myself as a lesbian at 9
When I was 9, in 1965, I was sitting unnoticed in the same room with my parents as they watched Sonny and Cher on TV. My mother remarked to my father that she had read in some gossip rag that people were passing around the rumor that Cher was a lesbian, but of course that could not be true because she was married. It caught my attention because I was having a really hard time with the idea of having to get married (which was mandatory for girls in those pre-feminist days and, in lots of families, still is). I "broke cover" by asking out loud, "What is a lesbian?" Both my parents were startled as hell. My father looked at my mother as if to say "You're the one to used the word, YOU deal with it" or maybe just to remind her "I'm the father, I don't do meaningful emotional sharing". My mother was visibly torn. She, of course, did not want to give me a definition. On the other hand, she had a rule she scrupulously observed that if we kids asked a question that was not offensive, we would get a respectful answer. The latter rule finally won out, and she said briefly "A lesbian is a woman who loves other women instead of men." Which is, for 1965, a remarkably clean answer. A bit misinformed, but I got the gist of it. And my immediate thought was, "So THAT'S what I am." I could tell from my mother's tone of voice, their discomfort, a million clues, that "lesbian" was not an okay thing to be. Once they forgot about me again, I sidled off to the dining room, hid under the table (one of my retreats in a house where I had no room of my own), and tried to figure out what on earth I was going to do. Clearly my identity was anathema to the people I loved most; clearly I would have to hide it, find a boy to marry, and pretend I was something else. I eventually figured out that the boy up the block who liked to wear dresses and play Jane to my Tarzan might be a good choice as a husband, and that bought me some measure of relief. I was a devout Southern Baptist at that point. Later that year, I began being molested, and when I went to women in the church for help, asking them "if a child is being hurt by a grownup, how can she get it to stop?", their answer was that the child must be doing something sinful to hurt Jesus, and if she prays enough and gets right with Jesus, she will have a change of heart. They also took the opportunity to teach me about original sin, how Eve's transgression in seeking self-definition and consciousness deemed all females to being dirty in the eyes of God. When I was 13, the Stonewall riots happened, and for the first time I found out that (a) there were other people like me on the planet and (b) there was a place I could go to find them. That kept me alive and sane during my adolescence. That same year, I turned my back on God in all forms, and it was not until I was in my 40s that I returned to a relationship with God. In the interim and currently, I have been happily lesbian, never had to get married, and eventually was able to come out with full community support. But that was later. Therapy has been essential for healing the damage done by those Baptist ladies, the rift I felt between my family and I, and reclaiming my rightful place in this world.
My self-identification as lesbian at age 9 had as much to do with not wanting to be crammed into a marriage box as it did with recognizing that when it came to emotional intimacy and lifelong commitment, I was overwhelmingly more interested in girls than boys. Boys were okay, but not intimacy material. Sex played no role in it whatsoever, so to call it a sexual orientation is a misnomer and, I think, plays into the confusion of children struggling with identity as well as the difficulty of their parents in staying open-minded.
I would ask the letter writer, does she know what it was at age 9 that made her think she might be a lesbian? What did she think that word meant? What in the definition still appeals to her, and what might have changed since then? If children were not raised with a crushingly narrow range of choices, how might they construct their emotional lives, their families, their inner identities and expressed passions? Sex is not the main factor here. Prior to the short era post World War II when the "heterosexual nuke fam" ideal got created (at least, for white middle class people), family life looked very different and in many places in America, as is still the case in may places in the world, it was easy to live an existence of gender segregation most of the day, most days. The genders came together to procreate and eat meals. Otherwise, you could be a girl and spend your life overwhelmingly in female company. Thus, the modern definition of lesbian cannot be used for all the generations of women before us who did not marry or married because of their parents' bidding but never emotionally bonded with a man. Seeing the long view will help illuminate the nuttiness of our current views about who we are supposed to love and spend our days with.