I haven't told anyone I'm a lesbian

I don't think my parents know. They talk a lot about how I don't dress right or act right, and how I need to be a good wife one day. They clearly understand something is wrong with me. But the way they ask me about boys at school, it's clear they think I'm just shy, or too nerdy, or too corrupted by video games or whatever, and it's made me a late bloomer. I've heard my dad in the other room joking about "What sad excuse for a man she'll bring home one day", because all of my friends are dorks like me.

What they don't know, what nobody knows, not even my closest friends, is that I like girls. I always have. I've known I was broken since I was really little. And for a while I tried to change myself because there aren't any gay people in my town and when people talk about them... they hate them. I don't want to be talked about like that by people who care about me. People I care about.

But I gave up recently. I'm a lesbian. I've never said those words out loud but at least I can type it in here. It's become painfully obvious that the way I think about girls is the way I'm supposed to think about boys. About how they look. About how they feel. And as I've started maturing and hitting puberty and learning about all of that, it's just becoming more and more clear what I want and I hate that I'll have to either live a sad life without love or a sad life without my family. But on days like today where I'm in my feels about it, I can't help but think that I'd rather have a girlfriend one day who actually likes all of me, than parents who only like me because they don't know the truth.

The idea of a girlfriend feels so abstract, so impossible, I can't even imagine what it would be like. And when I think about it too long I get overwhelmed and start to cry.