Hi I wanted to ask you a question about being bisexual. I think I might be but I'm not sure, I've never kissed anyone. I think I kind of have a crush on my girl friend but I'm not sure if I just crave affection and intimacy or ?? I was just wondering how did you know?? If you can't answer any of my questions it's cool, I love you and your blog

well i sort of grew up learning that you’re either straight or gay and that’s it. i was super religious in high school and believed at one point that being gay was a choice, so while journaling about religious stuff at age 16, i remember writing “if i wasn’t a christian i’d be a lesbian.” which, like, what the heck that’s so ridiculous lmao. 

so i knew i liked girls probably around the age of 15. i had a “people i’d date if i were a lesbian” list, and during my freshman year i was friends with a senior girl and she and i,,,,,,,,were really into each other. she’s my first real life crush that i can recall. my dad was actually the one who pointed it out to me and guessed that i was gay because of my relationship with that girl. 

toward the end of high school i thought i just needed to have a “lesbian experience” in order to “get it out of my system.” (i’m cringing just writing this shit btw.) so after graduation my gay best friend and i (oh, my best friend of 12 years came out to me during our senior year of high school and that kickstarted my conversion away from homophobia) went to a gay club and i danced with a girl and was like hooray there it was, there was my gay experience, now i can go be straight for the rest of my life.

cue college. by the time i got to college, i was finally beginning to accept that not everything is black and white, you don’t choose to be gay, and just because i liked boys doesn’t mean i couldn’t also like girls. i didn’t plan on doing anything about it, though. it would just be a little secret i kept locked away for the rest of my life. aaaaaand that’s when i met my college girlfriend. 

she was also super religious and had absolutely no clue whatsoever that she wasn’t perfectly straight. she would make that joke from parks and rec about us being “tragically heterosexual” and by that point i really should’ve corrected her but i wasn’t out to anybody so i didn’t say anything. the thing about growing up super christian is that u learn all these rules about how to interact with boys, what age you’re allowed to date, how long you’re allowed to kiss them, whether it’s appropriate or not to be in a vertical position with them, nonsense like that. what you DON’T learn is how to set those same weird boundaries with GIRLS. so my gf and i would sleep in the same bed together and cuddle all night long but we were both girls haha so it was cool and we could still wear our purity rings. 

we danced around each other for almost an entire year before finally sleepily making out with each other in the middle of the night in my dorm room bed. and then we didn’t talk about it. for an entire week. until it happened again. 

that was really what pulled me out of the closet. she and i had the same group of friends so we couldn’t exactly....hide...what was happening. so i finally started using the term bisexual to describe myself, and unfortunately since i was super christian i moved in christian circles and had a lot of christian friends and,,,,,absolutely none of them responded well to my coming out. hence why i’m not super religious today. 

idk if this answers your question at all, but i guess i knew because i was attracted to girls similarly to how i was attracted to boys. it took a lot of yanking and pulling to get me out of the closet, though. college helps. having a gay friend helps. a curvy, short-haired latina girl helps.