Am I Bi Enough?: A Journey Through Existing Outside The Limits of Queerness

Written by: Charmee Taylor @bi_astrology 

It’s Valentine’s Day, and the girl I had been seeing was starting to feel like a part-time job. The blurry rose-colored lenses I had put on three months ago had turned clear; I rubbed the eye crusties away and saw a person who only had the capacity to reflect what I didn’t. The relationship was slipping through my fingers like hot sand on a beach. I liked the idea of my first queer relationship, but the cost was losing myself. Stepping into who I wanted to be more. A quick family vacation would finally be an elixir to clear the dust. I needed a warm hug to embrace my broken heart and pick up the shattered dreams on the floor. I was sore and needed my family to help me pick up the sharp pieces; instead, I was met with pregnant pauses and questions like: “Do you want kids?” “Are you still an artist?” “Do you like boys or girls?” I was reeling. I realized I wasn’t hitting the queer milestones I desperately wanted and would never hit the ones my family wanted. I was floating in the liminal space that was my queerness, but even then, I wasn’t where I wanted to be and to top this whole little strange gray area off, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in my career. “Who the fuck I am? What the fuck am I doing, and what the fuck do I want?” This time, I needed answers… quickly. 

Let’s hit rewind. 

I came out four years ago. Partly with a cringy post on Instagram and partly with a heartfelt email to my close family signed with Beyonce holding the pride flag. Yes, you heard that right; the Virgo of all Virgos sign sealed and delivered the most heart-wrenching email I had ever sent. I was terrified because I grew up swimming in purity culture in a small town in Pennsylvania. I was taught to hate the sin, not the sinner. As a kid, our dear and close family friends invited us over to Thanksgiving dinner, where we were met with their gay uncles, and my family glitched, laughed, mocked, and snickered the entire car ride home. I wish I could say that the church taught me this, but intimate dinners and car rides showed me that being queer meant being ostracized. The church was just the final touch, the icing on the homophobic cake that my community created. God doesn’t like ugly. God doesn’t like liars. God doesn’t love little black girls daydreaming about kissing their best friends while walking to school. I shoved all my fantasies down, like stuffing in the Thanksgiving turkey, and put my efforts into getting good grades, joining Thespians, and college applications. If I succeed my queerness away, I’ll never have to face it. 

Rewind. 

College felt like a fever dream, mostly gray looking down the ends of vodka bottles and sloppy hookups with Marvin’s Room by Drake playing in the background. I was proud of myself for doing the thing that got me straight girl validation points at every corner. At this point, I was operating with a full punch card. Suppose I turned it into the straight committee, I might be picked to be married with kids and a house and after school soccer where I hand out orange slices. I might even marry a rich man and have a Range Rover to drop my future kids off at private school and take a few vacations to Saint-Tropez. But as much as that sounded like the right move, according to society, it felt like the wrong move, according to me. 

Fast forward. 

I make a finsta dedicated to being Bi and astrology. The more I understood my sexuality, the more I learned about astrology. To me, they were woven. The more I learned about astrology, the more I understood my chart, and the more I dove into my chart, the more I realized that I’m a non-traditional girl. I always thought that my pull towards going to a big city was nothing short of a non-traditional phase from growing up in a small town, but it was always cosmically written in the stars. 

I also understood myself, and the more comfort I felt exploring my sexuality, the more this account blew up. It’s been several years since I came out, but navigating the gray area has been difficult. Forging a path I never saw in TV, Film, or even real life feels weird. What’s even stranger is trying to explain to my family what it means to be queer without the politics, the internet, and the specific memes but what it means for me. Without being in a relationship. Without having a partner to hide behind. It meant seeing myself as queer outside of heteronormativity. I hate it here. Why can’t I hide like everyone else? Why can’t my queerness look like a heteronormative template like everyone else’s so that it makes sense when I present it to the world? Well, news fucking flash. I’m not like other girls. 

I’m sitting at a table full of my family; all eyes are on me. “So, do you like girls or boys?” “Both,” I reply swiftly. “How’s being an artist going?” “Good,” I say matter-of-factly. “Do you want kids?” “Yes, but with a woman.” There it is as direct as can be. At that moment, I realized that they yearned for questions they may have asked themselves when they, too, were questioning their sexuality. Maybe they couldn’t come to an exact conclusion to the equation of queerness, so they settled on hetero life out of fear. 

The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know the answers. I think queerness is questioning the very foundation of society, so, in turn, the milestones create a false sense of security in a very insecure world. Queerness wobbles the foundation like an earthquake in the middle of the night. That may be the point. And maybe that’s what’s so scary—the idea of forging a path that has yet to be created. I was swimming in the gray area as the artist I was created to be. Perhaps queerness is the highest, most sacred form of freedom, and being attached to milestones creates a more delusional world than I could ever imagine. Never taking a moment to question why you are doing milestones is the scariest part of life. Constantly questioning something feels very AI-core. Next time someone asks me about milestones, I’ll secretly remind myself that I am not a robot and that my queerness is expansive beyond measure, and fitting into milestones is a frivolous way to think I am secure in a deeply non-secure world. Still, I’ll nod and smile, knowing I unlocked the key to my world, shifting dimensions forging a new path, and creating my own queer utopia. The next time I get a question about milestones, I’ll say, “I don’t know,” more confidently.