Being Bisexual

This picture is me before my first Pride Parade (2017)

My coming out story isn’t as linear as it is for some, and perhaps it is simpler than it is for others. This is my story, and I want to tell it because I learnt some valuable lessons throughout my journey, and sometimes I had to take my own advice.

I had my first crush in primary school, I would hazard a guess at maybe year 5? She was beautiful and brave and I once thought about kissing her. I pushed the thought away so fast I gave myself whiplash, and I continued to push away the feelings I had until they disappeared entirely by the end of that year. Or, at the very least, I got very good at ignoring it.

Year eight, my first year of high school, was the first time I ever acted on a crush I had on a girl, but even still I just told myself that it was experimenting because everyone experimented with their best-friends. My realisation that I was in fact queer would have happened shortly after if said friend- who had engaged wholeheartedly in the experience- hadn’t made me feel guilty and disgusting about it for the rest of that year and the following year.
In middle school- years eight and nine- I not only had that experience, but I had my first ‘boyfriend’, and my second ‘boyfriend’, and my first kiss(es). I felt that this was how it was supposed to be. I was just following the story along as it had been written for me. As it was expected of me.

At the end of year nine I started to get small fluttery feelings for my new best friend (as I had fallen out of friendship with that girl from year eight). It was the strangest experience to be cuddled up innocently with her in the dark, watching the Hunger Games for the first time, and getting butterflies in the pit of my stomach when my fingers accidentally touched the warm skin under her pyjama top. This girl and I had spent all year laughing and joking and crushing on boys! Hadn’t we?

Things were starting to get worse and worse at home when year ten started (read here for more), they had been declining rapidly since year eight, and that was taking up a lot more of my attention than who I was crushing on. Except, I couldn’t deny the urges to kiss a friend in my group. It wasn’t my best friend I was thinking about anymore as I had pushed those feelings away, it was a second girl in my group. I just wanted to be around her all the time. I was so nervous to ask her to hang out with me though, we weren’t really that close as friends, we were just in the same group at lunch times and sometimes after school. Yet one day, fairly early on in year 10, I asked her if she wanted to hang out in the city with just me when school ended. Much to my relief, she agreed! I can’t remember where we were, I think it was a department store (coincidentally the one I work in now), when I sheepishly asked her if she had ever thought that maybe she liked girls? I wondered if she had ever gone through that phase, because surely I myself was just in a phase. She was so embarrassed when she responded with a yes, but she quickly assured me that she was well and truly out of the phase by then. I wasn’t sure if I believed her, and I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or grateful, but it solidified in me the belief that it might be okay if I had a crush on her. I knew what gay was, and I also knew that it was fine thanks to my family’s support of my cousin and my aunt who were both out of the closet.

I took this in stride and when I went home that night I went into the kitchen where Mum was making dinner, my fingers knotted together with nerves and my heart in my throat as I perched myself on the counter behind her.

“Mum? Did you ever… go through a phase where you thought you might like girls?”

She looked me dead in the eye, burst out laughing and shook her head.

“Oh my god Raegan, you are NOT gay,” she told me.

Well, that kind of destroyed fifteen year old me for a few days because it was becoming more and more apparent to me that I really did, in fact, like girls and was most likely gay. The girl from my friend group and I were growing closer and closer every day.

Then my mum took her own life.
Shortly after, during the whirlwind of feeling, I came out to my friends.
I told them that I liked girls.

I cannot remember now if I ever actually used the word ‘lesbian’ but the label stuck. Even though I had only told my closest friends, high school did what high school does and the word started to spread. Things got more and more uncomfortable for me. I remember being ashamed every time I got a new crush on a girl, and even when I started having more intimate experiences with the females I knew and the one girl I officially dated, I still felt like I was doing the wrong thing- no matter how good it really felt. I had even begun to remember my primary school crush, and even though I still felt (and do still feel) sick to the stomach about my experience in middle school, I also remembered kind of wanting it.
I definitely liked girls.

However, I had trapped myself. I had found myself in a box under the label ‘lesbian’ and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I knew by the end of year eleven that I wasn’t just attracted to girls, but I fell back on my coping mechanism that I had employed in year five- I ignored it and pushed it away until the feelings disappeared.

For the following years, I lived and breathed the label ‘lesbian’. I was out, I was proud, I danced with girls at the gay clubs, and I kissed straight girls in the straight clubs. I used dating apps solely looking for a girlfriend, I only ever dated females, and I told people that I was gay. I rarely used the term ‘lesbian’ when coming out, it didn’t feel right, but I could handle being ‘gay’. My entire family knew, those who would be accepting of it anyway, and any friend I would make would know fairly quickly.
It was just who I was.

Until it wasn’t.

It started to unravel for me at the end of 2018, when I was binge watching Shadowhunters on Netflix and couldn’t take my eyes off Matthew Daddario. God help me, I lived and breathed Alec Lightwood (Daddario’s character) for a few months and it followed me into 2019. He was my lock screen and my home screen, and he was the only person I could genuinely picture when re-reading the books the show was based on. I would skip through episodes I had already watched just to watch the scenes that he was in, I watched all the movies on his IMDb page, and I trawled through YouTube for clips, edits and interviews. I was falling apart and my ‘lesbian’ label was falling from my forehead as quickly as it had arrived. I felt like a younger version of myself, fixated on Shailene Woodley and Jennifer Lawrence, but hiding it the best that I could (which wasn’t actually hidden all that well apparently).

I was terrified.

I decided that I just wouldn’t think about it. Of course, this didn’t actually work and I had to talk about it. I messaged my close friend who lives in the eastern states of Australia, who had recently come out to me as bisexual herself. I told her that I was thinking about boys, and I told her that I was scared and uncomfortable, and that I wasn’t ready to consider that I was bisexual. Bambi, the nickname I gave my friend so long ago I have occasionally forgotten her real name, asked me what I was afraid of.
I was afraid of ‘re-coming out’ and I was worried about what people would say. I felt like a traitor to lesbians, and I felt like a complete and utter stereotype. I felt guilty that I was becoming part of the stigma around lesbians and that it would just encourage people to continue on saying ‘but you just haven’t found the right man yet’ or give men a reason to say gross things to others like ‘bet you haven’t had the right dick yet’. I was scared of proving right all those people, the people who had said those things to me and made me feel awful. It just felt too horrible and too much for me to deal with. I ended up telling Bambi that I was probably bi, but I would never date a boy so that I never have to deal with any of that because I wouldn’t have to tell anyone.

However, living a secret isn’t that easy. I had been preaching, supporting and living for the statement ‘love is love’ since I was fifteen years old. I didn’t want to feel like I was lying about my own beliefs by hiding back in the damn closet. I told Bambi that I was bi, and I told a few other people to test the waters and they were all supportive of me. Some said ‘well obviously, glad you figured it out’ or a variation thereof, which annoyed me a fair bit because I didn’t feel comfortable knowing that people had been making assumptions about me when I had been so confident in my sexuality for about four or five years. Alas, the overall response was supportive, and those I didn’t tell found out eventually when I dated a man in 2019. It took a few people by surprise, but I didn’t receive any negativity- at least not to my face or that I know of. It just felt good to be living my truth again.

Nobody called me a traitor, and nobody told me I was part of the reason there was stigma around lesbians, and no one treated me any differently. I just had to be proud of myself, listen to myself and my friends who knew me so well, and be honest. No one deserves to feel scared of coming out, everyone deserves to love who they love.

I just get to enjoy the ‘lucky dip’ of being bisexual. You never know who you’re going to love. You never have to choose a side, you just get to choose a person.

Please note that I only encourage you to come out if it is safe to do so, and to always reach out for help if you are frightened.