what am i ?
okay so I have struggled with my sexuality ever since the beginning of middle school (I’m 16 almost 17 right now) and still struggle with it today. it’s a very blurry zone in my life that i want to clear up before it ruins things even further. this is a long post but please read until the end and help me because i’m so lost 🥀
okay so context: in middle school i never had huge crushes on boys, only slight infatuations that i kindaaa picked myself. like i would work myself up thinking about the fact that they may like me, so it was pretty artificial. I got like two confessions from some of my male friends and turned them down instantly.
I thought that i got a crush on one or two girls in 7th grade but they were older and cooler so it mayyy just have been admiration. that led to me calling myself bi and then pan, but always privately (i only "came out" to my best friend at the time and it insanely backfired).
then, in 8th to beginning of 10th i went through a huge homophobic phase where i was pretty disgusted at myself for having thought that i liked girls, so i labeled myself as straight again (but still didn’t have any crush — boy or girl)
things started to shift sophomore year of high school when i was in a very artsy class and started getting into fanfics, especially marauders (iykyk) and it made me want to explore that part of myself again.
that’s when i met a girl. we got close extremely quickly, sharing all of our secrets with each other, staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning to text, going out every time we had the chance… I knew she had had a "story" with a girl previously but she didn’t know about me, because i thought it was going to make it weird. We were "just friends" but the intensity of that friendship was unmatched.
we constantly gifted stuff to each other, wrote heated friendship declarations… to the point where i started questioning my feelings for her. i didn’t even know if i had a crush or not, because once, i got the vibe that we were about to kiss and i got really scared and didn’t want to.
then it was the summer, and i went away to a camp without my phone, so we wrote each other long letters and i thought about her all the time, to the point where i cried once because i missed her so much (yeah the codependency was going strong) at the end of the summer we were closer than ever, acting pretty much like a couple, but then school came back and we were in two different classes.
we kind of drifted apart because of our different timetables (we were still friends, but none of that intensity we felt over the summer). I still liked her very much but it caused me distress more than happiness because i NEEDED to put a label on what i felt. i felt like if it had a label it would be easier to navigate the whole situation.
fast forward to October, i invite her to my birthday sleepover with our other friend, and that’s when she dropped the bomb: earlier in the afternoon, she had a boyfriend. it had happened the same day, and it completely ruined my mood for the rest of the night. and then the rest of the week, then the month, until i was barely speaking to her anymore, avoiding her in the hallways and not answering her texts. i don’t know why i acted like this, especially since we weren’t a couple, or weren’t even close to becoming one (she had thought i was 100% straight at that time, and i was still lost).
she still tried to engage with me, sometimes in a flirty way DESPITE having a boyfriend. I remember one time we were in a shared class and she sat next to him, and both of them sat behind me. they were like holding hands under the table or whatever doing a couple thing and meanwhile she was touching my hair.
she. was. playing. with. my. hair.
WHILE her hand was in her boyfriend’s lap.
it was devastating but anyways
so it ended there, and i can’t help but feel like if i had a label, i could’ve seen the situation better and either make a move or drop it and stay friends, rather than cutting ties. I DID "come out" (as in explain why i wasn’t talking to her anymore) to our third friend from my birthday and it felt really good.
also, maybe irrelevant but i engage with a lot of queer media, mostly mlm but sometimes wlw and I enjoy it a lot but i’m scared that it makes me a fetishizer or something if I’m not queer at all.
anyways i know this is long, but can someone tell me what i am ?? i never had a huge crush on a boy, and im not even sure i had one on a girl. What does that make me ? and YES i know that i should be able to exist outside labels but this is all very overwhelming
sorry for my english, I’m not a native speaker!! and THANK YOU if you took the time to read this, feel free to ask for precisions and share your pov on the situation even if it’s short <3