A lot of these narratives often focus on a pivotal point during life where people realize something they had been suppressing or the first time they realized their feelings towards others (or themselves) didn’t fit the most most prevalent narrative. My narrative is a little bit different. I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned how I feel about things - I just feel. The only question around feelings I tend to have is what to do with those feelings.

My whole life I’ve struggled a lot with loosely defined social concepts. Etiquette is a good example of a loosely defined social concept. What polite behavior is varies based on who you’re talking to, where you are, what you’re doing, what income bracket you’re in, and a billion other factors. It always made me wonder, why do we simplify to this single word? Why say that’s polite or impolite, when we could say something more accurate like “that kind of behavior causes people to be upset” or “you’re not being very considerate when you say that” or “we have a set of rules here and you’re breaking them and we do not tolerate that” or whatever is appropriate to the offense.

Because of this, while I do pay attention to these words and how other people use them (we live in a society 😔), I never developed strong narratives around them. Being born a certain way never made me feel like I had to do certain things or feel a certain way. I’ve always been attracted to people in a vaguely amorphous way based on a lot of different factors and in different ways. Some people are more attractive to me mentally than physically, but a strong physical connection can improve the mental and vice versa. I like being emotionally intimate with people, but I don’t feel like emotional intimacy is something that can only be sought after in a romantic context (just stop for a second and ask yourself what romance is, if you’ve never questioned it).

This is just a long preamble to say, to me it’s not about figuring it out. There wasn’t one moment. There’s been a bunch of moments, however, when I found someone’s narrative that matched mine and it gave me a new word I could use to describe myself. As I collected more and more narratives in the world from people that resembled me in different ways, these labels have shifted over time. As I spent time exploring the depths of these feelings, I figured out more behind why I wanted to act in certain ways or have others perceive me through a particular lens.

In terms of sexuality, the first label which I realized fit me was bisexuality. Over the years I changed this to pansexual because I liked the focus of people over their gender. Gender is unsurprisingly one of these amorphous social constructs that I do not understand. It took me a while to realize that some of my discomfort was around how I wanted others to perceive me and how I needed to change some of my presentation in order to get that treatment. At first I was just a cross-dresser, tapping into a deep-seated desire when the need pushed itself to the surface strongly enough. Eventually I realized that I was bottling up certain feelings when I presented to the world in a manner which didn’t really align well with how I felt. When I started expressing more subtly or slightly in that direction in the day-to-day, it felt less like my gender exploding out of a container which was being suppressed, and more like a happy medium. I redefined my gender from fluidity to non-binary and eventually to agender as I realized that the way I think about gender is not so much my feelings, but managing how others feel about and respond to me.

Speaking of amorphous social constructs, coming to the realization that I was also aromantic took an extremely long time. I strongly desire physical, emotional, sexual, intellectual, and basically all forms of intimacy and both pursue and suggest many of them with my partners. I’ve had partners who felt that we had an extremely romantic relationship. But I never understood how people framed how they talked about other people - why certain people were matches and others weren’t, and how they would know this right away. This isn’t how I view sexuality either - some people are physically very attractive because they take care of their body and have the right genetics and most of these people I’d very much like to have sex with because they are pleasing, but it wasn’t until I realized that there is just some innate feeling that people get, which isn’t necessarily based on the characteristics of the person but is just… like there… as a feeling… sometimes? That’s wild to me. I don’t understand this. I probably don’t understand this because I don’t also have this feeling - my feelings are more directed. I feel like I want to be intellectually intimate with someone who is smart or shares certain intellectual thoughts - the feeling happens after the connection or recognition of traits. Aromantic took me a long time to adopt as a label for the same reason (and it would not surprise me if I adopt gray-ace or some other aspec identity eventually), in that common narratives around a feeling just did not resonate with me, despite doing a lot of ‘romantic’ behavior because I value intimacy.