Connor Manning: Here’s a question I’ve been getting a bunch in recent weeks: “Hey Connor, are you ever confused about your sexuality?” And like, yeah, sometimes I’m sitting here thinking about it and I’m like, “Huh?” So that’s where we are.
A really common thing to say when you’re talking about bisexuality or pansexuality, or really anything off the binary is, “Bi people are not confused! They know exactly who they are!”
And like, yeah, a lot of bi people are really comfortable in their identities. That’s awesome for them. But there’s a whole heck of a lot of people that are confused, and that’s also okay.
General life rule: It’s totally okay to be confused about stuff. There’s a lot of really confusing things out there: traffic, space, confusing stuff.
Sprinkle on top of that: human sexuality. That’s a confusing thing objectively. Here’s a human doing their human thing. They see another human and they’re like, “I would like to touch my body to your body. Can we do that?” That’s a confusing, objectively weird, weird thing that people do.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane with me. I identified as straight until I was like 21. I only really felt sexuality, period, starting at like seventeen. So I was a late bloomer in that regard.
But around a year and a half ago, I was a very confused person. I was really confused because I was comfortable ID’ing as straight for all that time.
And all the sudden it didn’t feel right. Things were different, and I didn’t really know what was going on. I was so cared of the potential of being gay, like, so terrified of it, and anytime I would think that, I would like, shove it down and then I’d be into a girl be like “phew!” and I’d be super relieved.
So of freaking course I was confused when all this other stuff was finding its way out to the surface. Of course I was confused I had twenty-some years of conditioning to be a certain way and things were changing and I was trying to open up my mind to new possibilities, and that’s scary and confusing.
I’m still confused about a lot of things, not just sexuality. Just about a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of confusing things in the world, and there’s a lot of confusing things about growing up in this changing world. And all of that is okay.
If you’re confused about the future, what you want to do with your life, who you are, who you want to be with, what your relationships and friendships are, you’re okay. It’s okay not to know right now.
There’s a lot of pressure to “know,” because there’s a lot of pressure to be solid and confident in all of your choices, and all of your decisions, especially when they’re kind of against the “norm” of what the world has told us is normal.
And I’m not going to lie to you. It gets a little “dumb” sometimes with how people talk to you and how people say things to you and how they act towards you while you’re figuring these things out.
Turn the volume down on that a little bit and turn the volume up on you. Listen to yourself. Be cool and true to yourself. I’m not just talking about sexuality anymore. I’m talking about in general life stuff.
If you are confident, if you have a belief in yourself that you can be successful and that you can be good at whatever it is that you’re doing, if you have that belief, and you have that little fire flickering within you and nothing can put that out, you are literally unstoppable. Nothing can stop you.
And everyone deserves to feel that way regardless of who you are, where you come from, who you like, whatever. Everyone deserves to have that.
That’s pretty much it, though. If you guys want to leave a comment, you can do that. But I’ll see you on Friday.
