There is often a gap between what I know, intellectually, and what I feel, emotionally. I’m used to managing this gap — managing it the core of dealing with my OCD — and yet management is not the same as elimination. The gap persists. I still feel it. Maybe it will never go away.
I know, intellectually, that it is normal for one’s sexuality, for one’s gender identity, to shift over time; that while there may be people for whom these things are unchanging, continuous, over the entirety of their lives, those people are probably a minority. Because even cis straight people experience fluctuations: you’re attracted to older partners at this point in your life and younger partners at that point; you want someone similar to you but then you want someone different; you’re attracted to people who enable your maladaptive coping mechanisms and then you’re attracted to people who shut them down. It may not be as dramatic as being exclusively attracted to one gender and then exclusively attracted to another, but it is, nevertheless, a shift. You wanted one thing, now you want something else. You are not constant and unchanging.
So I know, rationally, that this is fairly typical. And yet emotionally: emotionally it is hard to accept, hard to have it sink in. Emotionally I am combatting so much messaging that tells me that there’s one “real” me who will be reveal if only I keep chipping away at things, that there is a fixed self who has been there the whole time if only I look hard enough for her.
And it’s not just straight people who have infected me with this mind virus (although, yes, they’ve certainly done a lot of damage with their fixation on monogamy and marriage and “one true love” and this idea that if a relationship doesn’t last forever then it was a misfire from the start). Queer people are just as guilty! So much of the “coming out” narrative is one of the true self shielded by shame and societal oppression, the “true self” that only emerges through realization of the queer public identity or gender transition or some other transformative act or reveal.
So I could, perhaps, be forgiven for the fact that, even at forty-one, even after over a quarter of a century of being openly bisexual, I still struggle with my own shifts and fluidity. If I’m more attracted to women in a particular moment, that must mean I was never really attracted to men; if I fall for this guy, that must invalidate every attraction I have had to women. The struggle feels even more intense given that the self I am in queer relationships and the self I am with men are fundamentally different: there are two mes, and they have a lot in common, but they are also very different, and one must be the real one, right? They cannot both be real, can they?
In my particular case, the distress is likely exacerbated by my OCD. But at the same time: we are fighting an uphill battle against a culture that keeps telling us to pick sides, to decide who we are, to stop dithering about and commit. It feels radical — it is radical — to reject that and insist that the self can contain multitudes, can be multiple versions coexisting at the same time.
And being radical? It takes work. Guys, it can be exhausting.
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