Personal Pride

I don’t know how I want to start this or even exactly what I want to say. Pride is a thing that doesn’t come easily for me. I’m only “out” as pansexual (or bisexual–I’m not gonna quibble over the details) in so much as I don’t necessarily shy away from it. I don’t generally go around announcing it, though I do keep some nerdy rainbow pins on my bag. It’s not something I discuss with family for the most part. Frankly, I don’t want to even deal with what my dad might think of me. Does it even matter? At the end of the day, my orientation is only a part of who I am.

Along those same lines, I identify as polyamorous. However, I don’t mean it in the way that most people would imagine. I’m not in an open relationship with multiple partners. I mean that I feel it as a part of who I am on an emotional level. I will not be happy trying to restrain who I form deep emotional attachments to, including on a romantic level. I don’t feel that love is a particularly finite resource (though I’ll admit that it’s probably more limited than my monkeysphere) that needs to be directed at a single person at a time. But for me, it’s about those emotional connections, not necessarily physical ones. This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate merging the emotional and physical, just that it isn’t an important part of who I am and what I need to express to be happy.

To complicate things, my romantic and sexual selves don’t see eye to eye. I’m open to sexual attraction with a wide variety of gender expressions. So one might think that would mean I’m open to a similar breadth of romantic interest, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. I usually try to explain it as being hetero-romantic. I primarily fall in love with women (though I’ll admit that my exposure to non-binary people has been minimal) despite finding men attractive. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that this kind of schism in desires is a bit weird. I’m pretty much okay with being weird.

Generally, I tend to refer to myself as being queer because of both my orientation and the fact that I tend to feel weird. I like the wordplay, honestly. So while I do see myself as being LGBTQ+, I also really feel that whole bi invisibility thing. I recently had a friend identify me as a “straight white guy” and I felt awkward about whether I should correct him or not. I certainly haven’t been overtly oppressed in my life because I easily pass for straight. I’ve mostly internalized it when people thought they could be homophobic around me while not knowing they were directly attacking me. It’s led to a lot of complicated feelings and often a low sense of self.

Much like I didn’t know how to start, I also don’t know what the point is here. Maybe there isn’t one and I just needed something to write about. Perhaps it’s a product of feeling unseen in a community that I exist on the edges of. Maybe I’m just depressed and needed a space to vent in. Don’t over-analyze it — that’s what I pay my therapist for.