For National Coming Out Day last year, I reflected on my coming out (or not so coming out) story and it still rings true to me. But I came across a line of writing from 2016 that I wrote specifically reflecting on my senior year of college: “I am a girl who didn’t want to come out at all but now that I am out I am out to win.”
It’s true that I’m pretty loud about my queerness now, but it was the first part of line that struck me when I read it again this year. My 2016 was closer to that girl who was not out — she remembers better. Because when I tell my story I talk about how it seemed obvious once I had a word for it. The instant acceptance.
Mine isn’t a story of self-loathing either. But even as I write that old memories come back that are hard to label as anything but “internalized homophobia.” Figuring out who I was was painful too. My sexuality wasn’t the whole of that story, but it was a part of it. I didn’t want to come out because I didn’t want to deal with what that would mean. I didn’t want to deal with how that would affect my choices. I didn’t want to deal with how it might affect my decision to get married to a boy I had loved a long time, no matter how fractured we were by the end of college. I didn’t think it mattered how much I wanted something and someone else.
After all my very LGBTQ school had taught me, there was still this buried bias that my feelings for a woman were less real. More experimental. Not the right path.
So when I wrote “now that I am out I am out to win” I meant that once I started building my life from the ground up I made my sexuality loud on purpose to try to drown out how much ignoring it and letting others ignore it had hurt me. I was so sick of the secret that I saturated my life with it so it could never be secret again.
I’ve used the term bisexuality for a long time now and it still feels good to me, along with the umbrella label of ‘queer.’ But sometimes I still question it. It’s the cleanest word for how I feel, but how I feel evolves, gets messy, and may change. Some days I feel like an imposter. Others I feel like I can’t believe I ever grew up thinking I was straight. It’s a process, ongoing, again and again.
When I was little, my friend whispered to me that I should stop trying to kiss girls because people would think I was gay and I spent over a decade forgetting that part of myself. I idolized (straight) fairytale romances until it was the only thing I thought I wanted. Luckily, I realized there’s a lot more to want in life. Coming out was an important part of that revelation.
With Love,
Natalie