Resolution at last

When I was in 1st class, a girl moved to my school. She was the most attractive girl I'd ever seen, and we were in the same classes all the way through infants and primary school. Because we were both in the top classes for most subjects, we remained in some of the same classes all the way through high school. I started to take an interest in girls around the end of primary school and this turned into an infatuation with the girl who I thought was the most exquisitely beautiful girl on the planet. Yes, I really did think of her like that.

Unfortunately, around the age of 5, when I was in kindergarten, I realised that I was different. I was weird. I was a freak. I wanted to dress up, look and behave like a girl, and I was absolutely certain that I was the only one in the world who was such a screwed up freak. Hence, I was a social misfit. I was also a geek. In 1978, my father built a microcomputer around a Signetics 2650 CPU evaluation kit. By about 1980 (age 11) I knew how to load programs either by hand from printouts, or using the cassette recorder that plugged into the computer.

So what happens when an extremely self conscious geek who is paranoid that someone will discover his dark secret of wanting to cross dress is infatuated with one of the most popular, attractive girls in the school?

Of course, I did things to try to make her notice me. Of course it all went wrong.

Virtually everybody who knew me knew that I was infatuated with her, but I could barely even talk to her. She was out of my league and I knew it. About the only thing that I was successful at was hiding my crossdressing from everybody except my mother (who didn't let on that she knew until years later). I later came to believe that I caused that girl a great deal of embarrassment over the 6 years of high school.

The last time I saw her was about 8 years ago, when my then pregnant wife and I got up and danced with belly dancers in a Turkish restaurant which has long since closed. I saw her, but didn't know whether she realised who I was or not. My feeling at the time was that she recognised me and looked away.

Today, I was looking through "people you might know" from high school on my male facebook profile and realised that she has recently joined facebook. I wasn't entirely sure how she'd react, and I sent her a friend request with a message attached, in part saying:

One of my biggest regrets in life is the embarrassment that I caused you in High School, and I'll understand entirely if you don't want to add me as a friend.

A few hours later, I went back on facebook to find that she had accepted my friend request, and had sent me a message in response, in part saying:

Please don't worry about high school that was such a long time ago. Happy to accept you as a friend.

It's incredible how those few words have lifted a feeling of guilt that has been in the back of my mind for over 20 years.

Now I have to decide whether to send her a friend request from my female profile or not. Perhaps not straight away. :)