Scarleteen

soo…i’m a girl and i’ll be 16 in a few months and i’m still very confused and conflicted about who am i. just for the context: my first “gay thought” was when i was 10. back then, I had just moved to a new city and had a new friend. and at some point i thought something like “a year ago i felt something like that to a boy, looks like i like her. i need to confess” and so i came out to her as bisexual, and then after a few days told her that i like her. since that day, i had some small crushes on other girls. (my biggest crush was when i was 13, i was in summer camp and i cried every week because that girl became cold towards me after i confessed. we kissed at once and she was very touchy in general, but i don’t remember that i was aroused. i was shy, sometimes embarrassed, nervous, but i don’t remember arousing. i wasn’t AGAINST it and i think i even liked it, idk, but i wasn’t aroused for sure. this is concerning to me) now i find some boys attractive too, and it’s really confusing. because at some point i think about having a sex with a girl, and i like that though, but after a few days i might don’t find the exact same thought as something exciting. same thing with boys. i feel like i’m lying to myself and everyone in general about being gay, and it’s really makes me anxious, sometimes i think that i made up all the feelings I was “having”, and all these time i was straight. i talked about it with everyone i could, but i still can’t help myself. sometimes i wish i’ve never came out to anyone, maybe even to myself. sometimes, i wish that i could start a new life where i’ll act like heterosexual (or be heterosexual idk) and if i’ll fall in love with a girl i’ll came out 100%sure. sometimes i even think “what if i had a conversion therapy?” i know it would be traumatic, but at the same time it feels easier. as far i know in my country it’s still possible to get a conversion therapy at some places, but it’s kinda expensive, and my family and i would never spend money on that. sorry for such a long post and mistakes, english isn’t my native language.

Hi there, MarieMartel and welcome to the boards!

And don’t worry about your English, it’s very good (and its not my first language either)!

How I understand it is that there are two different things in your post that we could talk about – not knowing your sexual orientation and not being comfortable with it. They are connected so I would like to start talking about the first one and maybe it’ll help untangle the second one as well, how does that sound?

I hear you talking a lot about sexual attraction (not feeling aroused, wanting to have sex etc.) so I would like to gently challenge the importance of it in defining your sexual orientation. It is true that people usually choose their words for sexual orientation based on who they are attracted to, but it’s worth noting that sexual attraction is not the only kind of attraction out there – there is also romantic attraction, aesthetically attraction, and others. And every person experience them differently and to various degrees, for example there might be a person who finds people of all genders sexually attractive but romantically feels attracted only to women so they identify as a lesbian, or there might be someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction at all but is emotionally attracted to masculine presenting people and identifies as homoromantic asexual. In addition to that, arousal doesn’t always equal attraction as it is whole body response while attraction is experienced only in our minds. Essentially the words you use for your sexual orientation are only yours and you should choose what you want to play a role in it. Does that makes sense?

You also sound worried that your attraction towards boys somehow invalidates your attraction towards girls, I hope it will help to hear that being attracted to people of various genders at once is something a lot of people experience (that’s what words like bisexual, pansexual, queer etc. usually stand for!) and that it’s something that often changes through the life, someone might be attracted only to women most of their life only suddenly to fall in love with nonbinary person.

As for wanting to live like a heterosexual, do you have a sense of why you feel like this? Is it only about the uncertainty around your orientation or about something else?

I would also like to quickly talk about the conversion therapy you mentioned, because not only is it harmful and potentially traumatic, it is also proven to be absolutely ineffective because who we are attracted to isn’t something we have much control over. If I use food as a metaphor, if you have a food that you really utterly hate, no amount of persuading from yourself of others that it’s healthy or delicious will make you like the taste of it better. Just like persuading won’t change your sexual orientation. And however difficult it may be, it’s always better to work on accepting ourselves and becoming comfortable with who we are <3