happy pride. i spent about 12 years considering myself bisexual and it’s weird that now when i see my friends biposting, i give them a “hell yeah, good for you” not a “hell yeah, me too.” but truly i have always felt so alienated from the concept of being interested in dating men or lusting over men aside from a very specific, unavailable, feminine-leaning few. mostly men who i wanted to be rather than be with. i found myself desiring something very deep and intense from them, something i couldn’t name, like if i could just get access to them in a way that meant they’d granted me their approval, then it would mean i was saved. and then of course whenever i got that approval i stopped giving a single fuck. “i think i think that fucking works like kirby,” i said to myself often. as in - if i could just gain sexual access to these people, then somehow i’d absorb their qualities and become who i really wanted to be. i now know it doesn’t work like that. and then you have to be in a relationship with them, ugh.
i’ve thought a lot about my persistent disdain for the notion of having an interest in the dating world. since i was a kid i found it mind-numbing and irrelevant and deeply irritating that everyone seemed to care so much about something that mattered so little to me. i had my first crush on a boy in 7th grade, but i didn’t call it that till 8th grade. before then it had just been this nebulous fixation - he was funny, the class clown. smart. good taste in music. everyone liked him. his eyes sparkled when he smiled and i thought that if he ever directed that smile at me, i’d become real. one day he came into class with a haircut and i suddenly found him completely uninteresting.
things that didn’t go away: me staring at all the girls in all my classes, deciding who i thought was the prettiest, getting giddy any time one of them was close to me or interacted with me. watching T[__] G[__] laugh with her group of friends, noticing how perfect her every feature was, watching as she started dressing cool and adult in a way i never felt able to and wondering why i felt strange about it. maybe i was jealous. i wasn’t as pretty as her and i wasn’t as popular as her (was she popular? i’m not sure) and i didn’t ride horses like her (i didn’t care about horses) and she was so sad when her dog paisley died, she cried in class and it made me want to comfort her, but i didn’t because she never spoke to me because i never spoke to her. i invited her to my laser tag birthday party and was astonished when she RSVP’ed yes. we didn’t speak at the party, either.
in sixth grade i passed my assigned after-school safety buddy in the hallway and he asked me if i was going to the spring fling. i looked at him; he was cute. attractive. nice, funny. he could be a reasonable guy to have a crush on. it could be fun to play the game, to care about him like all the other girls cared about guys, to wonder if he liked me and get nervous at the thought of asking him to go with me. i felt a deep pang of sadness that i didn’t care at all.
i decided i was bisexual in the summer of 2013… i think. maybe 2014. i had the biggest crush on a girl at theatre camp a few years older than me - she was so talented, so funny, so pretty. people thought she was obnoxious and self-centered but i liked that about her. it made her interesting. plus she liked doctor who and don’t hug me i’m scared; when we both sang “green is not a creative color” in the middle of an acting exercise, i felt my stomach turn over. act normal, i thought. then i was at home doodling her name in the margins of my summer math packet and i thought alright, yeah, sure. i’m bisexual.
(on her last day of camp before she went off to college and i’d probably never see her again, i told her “i’ve always looked up to you as a performer” because i knew she’d think it was cute and give me a hug. i held on a little too long. then later i saw the selfie we’d taken together and despaired, because next to her i just looked like some kind of weird adolescent creature. i treasured the picture anyway.)
a few years later in high school i briefly called myself pansexual, but i didn’t like the colors of the flag so i switched back. and that was it till this year.
now at this point in my life, in big 2026, i’ve dated 5 people: 4 men and 1 nonbinary person who i think has since transitioned to male. or maybe not, i don’t know, we haven’t spoken in years. at the time they let me call them my girlfriend. i was really excited to call someone my girlfriend. anyway - in all that time i’ve never had a happy relationship; all i’ve had is autistic masking and one-sided unconscious heterosexual roleplaying and bpd symptoms. i used to think i was “bi but could never fall in love with a girl” because girls didn’t make me crazy the way guys did. girls were just pretty. now, having gotten a little bit better at existing, i’ve learned that when you take away the crazy, guys are nothing and girls are still pretty.
so i’m not sure what to call myself now. i relate somewhat to lesbians but i’m not woman-aligned enough to feel comfortable with that term. and in that same vein, part of me wonders if my aversion to guys is just a transgender thing - i’ll always feel like a woman if a guy is attracted to me in this body. i remember attempting college for the first time, trying to make friends with the guys in my classes and feeling so deeply despondent that they saw me as something different from them, that they wanted me in a way that prevented me from ever just being one of them. sometimes lesbians get to be one of the guys. maybe that’s what i’m after. i don’t know. i’m too autistic for any labels to ever actually fit me. i just know i’m anything but cishet. even when i have been attracted to guys it feels like it was gay, because i saw myself in them, you know? i wanted to be them. so i guess i’m just nonbinary and gay, then. i dunno. gender isn’t even fucking real anyway.
i don’t really have a nice conclusion to this post or anything. i didn’t mean for this to sound like a substack article this is just how i talk when i write for long enough to have to include punctuation for readability’s sake. whatever. happy pride. i love you
