The first time I struggled with my sexuality was when I was sixteen. I was in a relationship at the time, and I remember feeling terrified of telling my boyfriend that I was bisexual. His reaction was non-judgemental and accepting, and it reassured me that my bisexuality was not something that I would ever have to worry about. For a few years, I coexisted with this fact, as dating a person of the same sex hadn’t presented itself as a real situation to me; while I was in a relationship, it wasn’t something that concerned me.
As I have gotten older, my sexuality has become something which I’ve thought about more. Coming from a secondary school environment in which sexuality wasn’t really discussed or disclosed, it felt strange to be so open about it in college. During my first week of college, I joined Q-Soc in Trinity and felt a bit more comfortable expressing my sexuality. As this happened, doubts began to creep in. While I felt comfortable expressing my sexuality, I also began to question the ‘legitimacy’ of it, and those two conflicting thought processes stirred up a lot of negativity around my identity. Being surrounded by so many people who were so comfortable with and expressive of their sexuality made me start to consider why I wasn’t more like that. I started to wonder about what identifying as bisexual meant to me, and, at the time, I began to feel that it really wasn’t a sexual identity worth expressing. The attitudes and culture that exist around bisexuality as a whole did nothing but reinforce this, and it left me feeling that bisexuality was nothing more than just a label – not something that people considered as part of their identity.
This feeling continued for a few years. I started to wonder whether I was actually bisexual. As I hadn’t ‘properly’ dated a woman, I began to think of myself as ‘less bisexual’ than other people who had had different experiences to me; when people asked what my sexual orientation was and I told them, I felt that saying I was bisexual was a tokenistic gesture with no real evidence to back it up.
Despite having experiences during that time that affirmed my bisexual identity, I found different things to attribute these experiences to, like having been drinking or believing that I had just been pretending. When I found myself in a same sex dating scenario, I really began to doubt myself. There are times when I’ve really struggled with this feeling of pretending, and the idea of my bisexuality being a ‘phase’ has been present in my mind more times than I would like to admit.
I don’t know where exactly my feelings came from. There was an uncertainty in my sexuality that I didn’t know how to rectify or what to do to ‘fix’ what I was feeling. I was terrified to go down the avenue of exploring my sexuality further as I thought that I might accidentally hurt people along the way. I would partly blame these feelings on my own internalised biphobia and I admit this is something I need to work on. However, as previously mentioned, this didn’t come from nowhere; negative stereotypes are prevalent in today’s culture. Very recently, there was discourse on social media about how bisexual women who have had relationships with men have ‘residue’ from these relationships that will always marr their future romantic prospects. This discourse is incredibly wrong on many, many levels, and talk like this can affect bisexual people in harmful ways. Personally, I found this discourse farcical rather than serious. However, the other attitudes I have explained were something that I was afraid would affect me when I began dating someone of the same sex. When I began dating someone of the same sex was when I realised that although these feelings are difficult to experience, there are ways to confront and acknowledge them healthily, rather than internalising and ignoring them. The way I have felt about this person has made me more confident in my sexuality. I now know that, while it is okay to sometimes feel insecure in my sexuality, I know that I wouldn’t be feeling the things that I do towards other women if I was not bisexual.
For so long I struggled with doubts, and did not deem my own experiences enough to ‘prove’ my sexuality. Starting to date someone of the same sex has brought these feelings up, and it feels as if they are finally being confronted. It feels nice to finally start to reassure myself that I am in fact bisexual and that my identity is valid.
