Author Archives: Jen Thorpe

The first time I didn’t want a friend to lose hope in our country

You have come home.

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I can only imagine how it must feel for you to have re-entered our frightful, violent motherland again. I can’t say anything to make you less scared, or less mistrustful of the fragile security you have experienced here. It must make you want to ask yourself ‘when will I be next’ and feel constantly afraid. I am so sorry that this has been your experience.

I think though, that there is no place like our country. That there are no people as down and out who remain generous and kind. There are no women like ours, beaten and raped and poverty stricken, who open their hearts to each new day and keep on going. This doesn’t mean we must burden ourselves with flying the South African flag high, or trying to push against the violence. Our first and most important priority as women and feminists is to take care of ourselves so that we feel able to encounter the challenges we face here. If that means we need a time to be away from here, then we must take it and feel grateful that we have been offered the opportunity.

I remember when I came back from London’s security after just three months there, and felt enraged that I couldn’t just LIVE here. It took a long time to be able to walk around without feeling frightened. With your particular experiences, it will likely take much longer.

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Image via imgfave.com

Don’t be too hard on yourself about the difficulty you’re experiencing in re-immersing yourself with a country at war with itself.

The only thing I want to say is don’t lose hope. One day you’ll come home and it will feel like home again. The home of ice cold cokes sipped outside corner cafes in the warm sunlight that I really believe is like no other sunlight on earth.

We can’t be the change we want to see when we are afraid. We have to take steps to embolden ourselves. Take those baby steps when and however you can.

I’m with you all the way.

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The first time I had sex with a boy

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Image from pinterest.com

I was 14 and everything seemed wrong and hypocritical, and also it was at that stage where you feel you’re the first to ever experience it.

Social compression and boredom forced me into what my parents would have called ‘rebellion’ and I was amazed, as Lucy must have been in Narnia, to find a microcosm of disillusioned deracialized children from alternative schools, who accepted me, allowed me to feel part of some broader adolescent experience. I pantomimed appreciation for third-rate metal bands, learned to smoke pot and read Catcher in the Rye.

It was a time of blurry-faced young people molten in alchoholic fumes, and hitching rides with truckers at night in order to find some stranger’s party.

I met this Cyril (age 17) in one of these dreamy nighttime sprawls. He had an archaic name and a face like an angel, a young steam-punk Narcissus trawling the darkened suburbs with the grace of a gazelle. I was in love with him the minute I saw him, and I never ever believed he could love me back. In the way of adolescents, we ensnared one another with Myspace and sexual innuendos. One night we got to sleep over in the same house, and, in the middle of the night we both jolted up and started kissing. I could not believe I was holding someone so liquid and golden in my arms. I hadn’t kissed many boys then.

When I started going out with this Boy, my two worlds fused: the daytime one, in which I was a nerd at a private school, with my secret nighttime self. Cyril in the daylight, in my parents’ eyes, was this scruffly youth with broken sneakers and a sullen demeanor. He was allowed to sleep over but emphatically in different rooms.

So began a ritual of sneaking into the spare room at night, where we would undress one another, suck and kiss each other’s bodies until our mouths were numb with a slightly sour taste. I gave my first hand job, blowjob and so on. I was slightly alarmed at penises and even more so when he tried to put it in me. I was small and sexually premature, despite being hell bent on rebellion.

So began a bad time. I was convinced something was wrong with my body, and the pain was excruciating. I would clutch his throat to stop him breathing so loud, and I would try separate myself from my experience and focus on the dark passage where my family lay sleeping.

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Image from imgfave.com

Because of the creaking bed, I made him try take me on the floor. I remember how it felt to be flattened between the wooden floorboards and his body. The feeling of that dull fleshy instrument against some unspecified region in my vagina, shoveling unsuccessfully into me.

In the daytime, my mother started coming down on me. In a terrible voice, she told me she was not an idiot; she noticed ‘all the tissues in the bin’. That was all she said about it, but our mutual discomfort slapped us both in the face. She thought I was giving hand jobs. The truth made me want to cry. Cyril continued to sleep over and so the ritual of trying to lose my virginity continued, even in the face of mine and my mother’s red-faced shame.

Not only had my contradictions fused, the once binary parts of my life began to interchange. Now me and Cyril tried to lose my virginity in the bright afternoon. At night, as I lay next to his sleeping body, watching the clock for when I should tiptoe back to my room, I felt young and little and wanted badly to be a child again.

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Image from pinterest.com

I was staving off penetration like it was death, but I began to tell myself that both were inevitable, and I must release my body to him. That afternoon something was different. He put on the condom and moved into me with fluidity we had never experienced, and I could feel myself permeable to him. My overriding feeling was triumph, that I was not an anomaly. Once it was over I held the condom, still warm from my body, and contemplated the semen inside.

That night we went to ‘The Fountain’. A damning movie to lose one’s virginity to if ever there was one. I have since re-watched the movie and have felt tired and disappointed.

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The first time I realised that my friends weren’t as great as I thought they were

I’ve always seen the value in being alone. I might not like it, but I see its value because it keeps me from getting hurt.

Being the lone wolf, however, is not a strategy that gets one very far. For the past couple of years, I’ve let many people into my life. I’ve told them so many of my secrets. I thought that the hardest secret to tell would be about my bipolarity. But it turns out that I’d rather people know that I’m bipolar than that I’m bisexual.

I know that there’s nothing wrong with me. I know that I deserve to be happy and to love openly. But other people don’t know that. It’s amazing, because people who have been so accepting of my bipolarity always have the same things to say about bisexuality.

“But how do you know?” (How do you know if you’re straight?)

“Ugh, I couldn’t like a guy who slept with guys!” (If sleeping with guys is so gross, why do you want to do it?)

“Ugh, that’s so greedy.” (‘Bisexual’ does not equal ‘screwing everything that moves’.)

“You’re just confused.” (I’m not. I’m not and you don’t have the right to tell me that I am.)

I’ve only told one person that in the past three years. She was supportive, but confused. She thought that, because I’d never slept with a guy or a girl, I couldn’t know whether I actually liked both. But her response was generally good, so I wanted to tell more people.

I tried, I really did. I called some of my friends into my room for a study/snack break. Bisexuality came up because a song played on my laptop that was sung by a bisexual male artist. And before I knew it, all but one of them were saying the same old ignorant and hurtful things. I got upset, but I tend to get upset by all prejudice (imagine that), so I don’t think anyone noticed anything out of the ordinary. But it hurt. It hurt more than anything has hurt in a long time because I knew that they would feel differently about me if I told them. Our jokes would all seem inappropriate (we’re masters of innuendo), our hugs would change.

So now, I’m beginning to see the value in being along again. The real me, the one I lie about every day, is alone. And I notice her more and more every day.

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