How old were you when you began questioning/considering you weren’t “normal”? I’m in my 30s and almost all at once feel like I’m not sure what I am in most demensions and struggling to figure out what I feel about anything. I’ve been married, happily for a while, which adds a little to the confusion.
I began to question my sexuality early – somewhere around age 10. That process continued for a full decade until, at age 20, I admitted to myself that I was 100% gay with no qualifications.
One factor acting against me in my search for self knowledge was my limited vocabulary; society – or at least the part of it I was attuned to – didn’t have expressive language beyond “gay, straight or bi” and it was hard to decide whether I could wear any of those unsubtle labels. I also had to deal with some internalized homophobia and a lack of queer role models or acquaintances in my life.
If it’s any help, I can see, in retrospect, that I spent too much time considering how to label myself and not enough time considering how I felt and how I wanted to act on those feelings. It is only by knowing our feelings and acting on them, repeatedly, that we truly come to understand who are are; how we identify is, in some ways, secondary to those concerns.
Thanks for that last part. While somewhere in the back of my mind those ideas were floating around, seeing it written by someone else really helped reel some stuff in. I did question how I felt, and then thought about labels maybe being relevant that I never remotely considered a possibility and got super tripped up on that.