I feel a little odd posting this but in the hopes that my navel gazing will make someone else feel seen:

One of the reasons why I have historically felt a lot of confusion around my queer identity is because I just haven't seen the way I experience attraction modeled anywhere.

Like, yeah, I'm "bisexual," but what that even means is nebulous and confusing. To a lot of people, it suggests that my relationships are the same regardless of the gender of my partner, which... has never been the case for me.

I relate differently to men than I relate to women; and I experience attraction to men differently than I experience attraction to women. It's not that either one of them is lesser, they're just *different*, and that feels like something I'm not supposed to say.

I also feel like my attraction to men is broad but shallow, while my attraction to women is narrow but deep: there are more men I'm interested in exploring with, but I'm more interested in exploring deeply with the women I do like.

So like, what even is that? How do you express that?

I want to be clear that I am NOT ASKING FOR A LABEL, because a label isn't the point to me. A label feels like a way of making myself legible to other people; and I don't give a fuck about that.

What I care about is being legible to *myself*. And I am frustrated that so many nuances of bisexuality are so stigmatized that I have had a really difficult time achieving that sense of legibility.

I'm frustrated that talking about the fact that it's easier to find men I'm attracted to makes it sound like I'm really just a straight girl who wants to fuck around, and I'm frustrated that acknowledging that gender shifts my attraction feels taboo.

[Interstitial note to say that *yes* I'm attracted to non-binary people but *no* I don't broadly categorize them in this same way because non-binary people defy categorization!]

Anyway I was thinking last night that the men I'm most attracted to tend bring out the qualities in myself I like the least while the women I'm attracted to bring out the qualities in myself that I like the most, so if that's an orientation, there you go.

Also I should probably clarify that that's not a commentary on the *men* themselves; while I have spent a great deal of time scrounging for partners in the trash pile of humanity, plenty of perfectly lovely men have chosen to get close to me.