Why does being a lesbian have to feel like a life-planning problem?
I’m just so fucking tired of the frustration that comes with being a lesbian/wlw in India.
Like, I didn’t choose where I was born. I didn’t choose the time period I was born in. I didn’t wake up one day and decide “hmm, let me make my life harder by being attracted to women.” This is literally just who I am.
And being born into a fucking Hindu Brahmin family where nobody has ever had a love marriage and it’s always been arranged marriage just makes everything feel so much harder. Like how the hell are they supposed to cope with the person I choose being a GIRL?
And it’s not even like something crazy has happened to me. Nothing particularly horrible has happened to me personally. I’m just exhausted from constantly having to WONDER. Wonder what my future is going to look like. Wonder if my family will accept me. Wonder if I’ll have to leave the country just to feel safe and secure. Wonder if I’ll have to choose between the person I love and having my family around me.
And honestly, look at the state of everything around us. We’re still dealing with voter names disappearing from electoral rolls, women not feeling safe, casteism, religion, communalism, racism — like we haven’t even gotten past the most basic fucking problems yet. We’re still fighting over all of that and I’m sitting here wondering when we’ll even get to the point where my sexuality isn’t another thing I have to worry about.
And where are our role models? I genuinely can’t think of a famous, successful, openly lesbian Indian woman in the public eye and think “yeah, I want a life like hers.” Let alone having someone like that in my actual life.
It’s just exhausting having so little to look at and think, “okay, this is what my life could look like.”
Why should I have to move to a completely different fucking continent, away from my family and everything I know, just to have a secure life with the person I choose?
I didn’t ask to be born here. I didn’t ask to be born into this time. I just want to fucking live.
I’m not hurting anyone. Why can’t people just mind their own business and let us live?
Whatever happened to “live and let live”?