Will You Ever Discover Your Sexuality?

Padma (she/her)

“Am I gay quiz?” 

I type frantically into Google for the fifth time. I’m in my family’s living room after a long day of 7th grade, trying to deeply imagine what being gay means as I attempt to answer all the questions on my screen. I keep finding new quizzes, dodging each annoying pop-up that comes my way. No matter the results, I never reach an end in my quest to find the group of words that perfectly describe me.

Since then, it feels like I’ve made both immense progress and none at all to answer the question, what is my sexuality? 

I finally determined a few years ago that bisexuality was never going to have a satisfying conclusion; there’s no proof or single moment when you say, yes, I am perfectly bisexual, and I never have to think about this again. And finding satisfaction in that unsatisfying answer was my greatest power. 

But I wonder, if you don’t have that “proof” of something, does it exist at all? 

I’ve always thought of sexuality as this thing. It exists inside of you and determines your attraction, your interactions, your thoughts, your desires. Once you “discover” your sexuality, all of those things–attractions, thoughts, and desires–will make sense and fall in line with this sexuality. All you have to do is get to the bottom of it, put a name to it. For queer folks and those questioning, it becomes clear that your sexuality, that thing, doesn’t take a clear shape. It’s not a square, not a triangle, not a circle. Maybe it’s a blob? It’s clear that you don’t fall into the “norm,” but beyond that, what is it? 

For a while, I thought that maybe we just didn’t have the language or the words to describe it, and we’ve been trying to map this 4D blob into 3D reality, like describing the height of something with only colors. Maybe it’s too complicated to understand, let alone to describe. It changes; it gets obfuscated, confused. It’s deeply affected by heteronormativity. Unpacking the layers to uncover its true, untainted form requires effort.   

Lately, I’ve started thinking that maybe this blob doesn’t exist at all, that maybe none of us actually have this thing inside us called sexuality. 

Maybe the number of quizzes taken, the deep self-analysis, or even the interactions we have with people will never reveal “sexuality.” Maybe we can never truly be able to identify what our sexuality is, because we don’t have a specific, well-defined, underlying sexuality at all. If anything, our thoughts, our interactions, and our self-reflection are our sexuality, not derived from it. Instead, we may be ever-changing, confusing humans who just feel and do things.

Under this framework, no one has to make statements like, “I’m gay, but …” or “I’m straight, but …” or justify “deviance” from one’s label of sexuality because our thoughts and attractions don’t need to be so rigid. Your fluctuating and sometimes random feelings don’t have to perfectly align with a word. 

All of this is not to say that labels can’t be incredibly useful in coming to terms with one’s sexuality. I just feel now that labels map general feelings to social experience and have social utility, but they don’t necessarily describe our holistic selves or have a truth value. If someone identifies as gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, etc., I completely understand and respect that. I myself have recently found a lot of comfort in the label “queer” in that it generally demonstrates who I am to other people when I need it. For me, it is a word with social utility in language, but not necessarily an identity. 

Even if this framework doesn’t resonate with you, it is something I wish I could tell my younger self about. I want her to spend less time trying to classify, name, discover, or even understand her sexuality, her blob. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. What matters is doing what makes you happy, doing what allows you to be happy. Your interactions and experiences don’t have to be meaningful or fit into a story you’ve created for yourself. They can just be there. ​