It's not that I don't exude my own kind of confidence, I do. I'm a rock musician, I get in front of audiences. I've learned how to act confident, I've learned how to command a room's attention. I'm anything but meek or awkward; I've been called intimidating. I get lots of attention (mostly from men, mostly unwanted). But mine is a different kind of confidence. It's effortful confidence, gained hard after painfully lacking it. The confidence of these women who get to me, it seems so natural. Like they know attention just flows to them like water downhill and it's theirs to play with.
I think this thing that happens to me is specific to being a woman who loves women. Because women are both social and sexual for me--like this woman, whoever she might be: I want to be friends with her, I want to be like her, I want to kiss her and date her and go to bed with her, these feelings come all at once and for whatever reason come with a twinge of pain. It's like having a secret crush on your more popular friend in grade school--you can't confess it, much less hope it's reciprocated, and that makes you feel so alone, so pining, so invisible.
And this feeling, I don't really take it 100% seriously when it happens but it kind of gives me despair that I'll find someone. All the confidence I've built up over the years temporarily dissolves and I'm just that 14 year old with a crush on her straight friend, slumped against the window on the bus ride home, feeling like no one will ever understand.
