on maps & queerness

Every Wednesday afternoon, my sweet therapist reminds me there’s not a roadmap for my life, and every Wednesday afternoon, I nod along reluctantly while I spend the rest of the week still secretly seeking. I've spent most of my life thus far desperately searching for a model, a checklist, a map that even with all its winding roads and detours still ends at a fixed destination, a summit with a panoramic view of all the trails that led me to this accomplished endpoint.

I spent a long time looking for a map in all the wrong places, looking so far outside myself I stopped seeing the cartography and topography of my own heartlines. Until my mid-twenties, I would’ve told you that I didn’t have needs or desires or even a personality of my own (hello, fellow Enneagram 2s!)—I was so consumed by my relationships and by everything external that I never introduced myself to me, held her hand and got to know her in tender whispers. I was so obsessed with seeking elsewhere I ignored everything in me that didn’t fit with what I saw out there. I minimized my empathy in favor of accomplishments and perfectionism; minimized my chronic illness in favor of a slippery “normality”; minimized my queerness in keeping with the rigid and uncomfortable binaries I saw all around me.

I don’t remember when I first learned about bisexuality, or when I first identified as bi. I do remember sharing crushes on hot popstars with my younger brother, crushing on my now-fiancé as well as girls on the soccer team, feeling like “straight” and “hetero” were labels that grated, poked and hurt, but I didn’t have better language in my “straight-passing” relationship so I might as well be the world’s most enthusiastic ally and stick to discordant heteronormativity.

I know now that there are words that don't feel like thorns but rather like a warm hug, like coming home—”queer” and “gay” and “bisexual”—and if a label hurts me instead of holding me, I don’t have to keep it. I’ve learned that queer community is as joyful as it is infinite—we are ever expanding to hold each other more fully. I’ve learned that all the gatekeeping I experienced, the imposter syndrome, the “not straight enough” and “not gay enough”, the binaries enforced everywhere around me, none of that is queerness. Queerness is abundant and unlimited and kind, it’s a reunion with a long-lost friend, it’s safety and possibility and creativity and adamant, permanent belonging and it’s sure as hell not cops, including the one in my head.

I want to wrap my confused teenage self in a tender hug and tell her: there really isn’t a roadmap—I’ve tried. There’s no roadmap for queerness, and that realization will be as liberating as it is terrifying. If something feels sticky or doesn’t fit quite right, it’s not you: keep searching. I can’t promise someone who can give you all the answers (I certainly haven’t found them yet), but I can promise that one day, you’ll find yourself beautifully surrounded by communities of queerness, abundance, expansiveness and possibilities beyond your wildest childhood imaginings. You can kiss girls and marry a man and keep dreaming big along the way.

I want to tell my younger self about the cheek-bursting joy of sharing queerness with friends, seeing it within each other, learning about ourselves in community. I want to tell her she’ll have friends who use labels she didn’t even know, and she’ll find words that fit and help her navigate the contours of her heart. I’d tell her: you’ll mess up, but not with this, never with this. Every trail or winding detour is leading you not to an ever-elusive summit but deeper into the forest of yourself. We might not know where we’re going but damn, our trees are beautiful in the meantime.

I hope one day, every little kid is free to explore queerness outside the confines of cisheteronormativity and white supremacy. I wish for more abundance for my community—more dancing and less trauma; more glitter and less emphasis on “coming out”, more emphasis on coming in, coming home, becoming, always becoming; more belonging and growing and building something better together. While I have a complicated relationship with resilience and the systems that force resilience upon so many, every day I am in awe of queer resilience, how “queer” and “resilient” are synonymous to me, how much we can learn from our Black trans siblings especially about wholeness, expansiveness, radical joy.

This is my reluctant acknowledgement that my therapist is right, as she tends to be: there’s no map, which means we get to create it, define it for ourselves. So for today, I’m putting down my anxious searching and taking myself dancing.