In 2001 I made out with a girl friend or two.  I tried to come out as bisexual to people I thought were close friends at my high school, and consequently brought myself all the negative attention in my whole world.

I stretched my ears daily on the bus to high school because my parents didn’t want me gauging them out.  I would take out the spacers on the way home and hide my bloody, abused lobes whenever I was around my folks.  I made it to zero gauge like this, and honestly I feel lucky my ears didn’t just fall off in refusal.

I had a few really amazing, supportive, good friends.  But they were from other schools, so I would see them on weekends if I was lucky.  Some of them were gay, which helped.  We’d talk about actual things even though I was already deeply closeted by the time I became close with these friends.  One helped me pierce my tongue frenulum as well as my septum.  The pain felt exactly right.  One of those piercings was much easier to hide from my parents than the other.

Everybody at school thought the visible piercing was fake.  I continued to be a target.  Nobody else had this piercing.  Nobody else at my school wanted to tell people they were bisexual.  I was alone.  The bullying was thorough and cut me cleanly from any local friendships I’d experienced up til then.

One girl in particular wouldn’t lay off.  Everybody thought she was the shit.  I wonder if her heart was rotten by nature or nurture, because she seemed quite unloved.  I had really wanted to be her friend, even as she picked on me.  But I kept supplying ammunition in the form of “poser” behavior.  She got meaner and meaner, pretending to acquiesce and then upping her brutality a notch or two.  She may have invented cyber-bullying–after one particularly worthless session with an incompetent student counselor, she started new AIM profiles just to pick on me using everything we’d discussed.

I smoked weed whenever I could, but even the local dealers were shitty to me.  They stole my money and sold me bags of stems instead of bud.  I would be empty-handed at parties.  Nobody from my high school wanted to hang out with me unless I had drugs.  Sometimes I could find acid from older kids who were above the bullying I was experiencing.  Those were especially weird nights though.  Then those friends graduated and the abuse only worsened for me.

I learned to smoke cigarettes.  I snuck out a lot to do dumb shit with people I didn’t even like.  I applied for boarding school.  I begged to transfer to a school where my friends were.  I just wanted to be a weirdo with weirdo friends.  I just wanted to be safe.

Later, I would discover ketamine.  I wouldn’t share it, but instead guarded one baggie with my life for months.  K could help me get through a rough school day without noticing all the bullies.  I would do small bumps in the school bathroom.  I even heard a rumor that somebody thought I’d been crying in there, cuz sniffling, which is something I actually don’t remember ever doing, but I was relieved they didn’t assume I was doing drugs.  I needed that medicine, in those days.

My father would regularly repeat to me that “Everybody had a hard time in high school” which in turn made me wish that I was getting a real education, because that argument isn’t viable.  My brother seemed to be doing just peachy.  Must school be a horrifying rite of passage?  I wondered what my father, a white, heterosexual cis-male who’d attended exactly the same high school, went through to make him so jaded toward his daughter’s very real, isolating pain.

Teachers bullied me, too.  The boys’ gym teacher, who I had very little interaction with, referred to me as “Paint Chips” which I didn’t understand.  He politely explained, “You must have eaten them as a child.”  I was still a child.

One teacher didn’t like that I was smarter than she.  She and I would get into it often in class, most notably about the fact that “persons” is a word.  This particular argument, and sad excuse for an educator, prevented my entrance into Advanced Placement English my senior year.

Luckily, neurotypical English was taught by somebody awesome.  Somebody who’d been through some shit and saw me going through mine.  Luckily, he wasn’t the only one.

I also had a mother who saw my pain clearly and let me see my real friends as much as possible.  She took me to hang out with groups of university women whose power and sexuality was just budding in the most beautiful ways.  They loved me like the little pet I wanted to be to them, and I learned a lot just by being present in those Vagina Monologue days.  Mom would drive me home after and treat me to yogurt parfaits.  We’d talk.  Literal life-saving.

This was long before the “it gets better” movement and well after I’d closeted myself, but there were constant reminders from all different kinds of women I admired who could promise that life would change.

And here, here is where my tears begin.  My gratitude for those women knows no bounds.  I want them to know how dear these memories are to me, and how related to life over death those experiences truly were.  It gets better.  Everything does, even when the world is burning around us.  We have each other.  We have sisterhood.

I have no sympathy anymore for any person who identifies as a woman but isn’t actively, emphatically supporting other women.  Any woman who drags another lady for her looks/sexual choices/money-acquisition/truth can catch this mouth calling her out.  I have no patience for any moment in which feminist speech is stifled (or less than intersectional).  I have no time for women who don’t bother to lift up their sisters.

Sisterhood is magic.  Pain has made me the brave, independent weirdo babe I am today, but I couldn’t have done anything constructive with any of it were it not for the midwifery of those who’d come before.  We are all we have, and we are everything.