My Sexuality is Valid and So Is Yours

Sexuality to a large extent can be fluid. It could also take a flipping through many labels to finally find the one for you, in case you want one for you. The whole point of having so many labels under the LGBTQIA+ banner is that no one should have to fit in a box they don’t think they belong in.

We bring you a story from a girl, (who has preferred to stay anonymous) of her discovering her sexuality as a lesbian asexual, and gradually shifting to the self realisation to being an out and proud lesbian. Here it is:

“Considering how much I dislike those overused Wattpad/RomCom tropes, it’s ironic how my whole lesbian realisation started in the most cliche way. It was the first day of school, and my class teacher assigned this really pretty, popular girl to sit with me. If only the younger me had known at that moment how much my worldview was gonna change because of that person. But at this exact moment, I was too full of fifteen-year-old angst and desire to be cool to even notice her much. Then she started making me laugh and she liked my drawings!"

She tried to get me to make her physics diagrams for her, I said absolutely no way, and that was pretty much how our friendship started.

Thinking about her makes me smile, even now, because oh my god I was so clueless, but so smitten with her. I laughed at all her jokes like a mad person, I couldn’t stop smiling when she texted me, I thought she was the prettiest person ever, I even talked about her to my PARENTS of all people.

You know what it takes to make us willingly tell our parents about our social life? Anyway. Fast forward a few months, I realised I was a lesbian. And my biggest disappointment was that this realisation happened right after pride month of that year got over. Dang it!

If I’m being honest though, I had to go through a lot of internalised homophobia. For a long time, I didn’t want to call myself a lesbian because the word felt overly sexualised and just weird. I felt like it was okay for other people to be gay, sure, but not me.

It’s a whole process of accepting that your idea of who you are, and your identity, has changed drastically. But reading an old diary entry from the time and seeing how convinced I was that I was straight, that’s pretty funny. Newsflash, little me, you’re very much a lesbian, and it’s not a bad word.

Even after all that, though, I was distinctly aware that my friends seemed to talk about their crushes very differently than I did. To me, the person I had a crush on seemed to just become more and more beautiful as time went on, and that was about it. I hadn’t felt a lot of physical attraction to anyone and I started identifying as asexual.

Would I still identify as asexual now? Probably not. Looking back, my reasons for identifying as asexual was probably also because I was a bit insecure about my sexuality and honestly, all the portrayals of sex I’d seen at that point were usually misogynistic or just plain disgusting.

Well, that was the younger me and the present me wouldn’t really identify as an ace but that was my experience and it absolutely doesn’t give anyone the right to tell ace people that it’s just a phase. Let people decide for themselves. Y’all asexuals out there are valid af!”

As told to: Stuti Titus. This series is part of a special arrangement between SheThePeople and Mini Papyrus. Mini Papyrus is a community and a safe space for LGBTQIA+, young adults facing mental health issues, feminists and allies.