#NationalComingOutDay I'm bisexual. It's been a confusing journey for me to reach this point, but I'd like to own that identity now. I feel capable of embracing it.

For most of my life, I didn't recognize my queerness as unique to society because I was raised in a queer household. We had to hide any indicator of queerness due to Don't Ask Don't Tell, but at home we'd joke because the prevailing hetero-"norm" didn't seem normal to us at all.

As an adult, as I began to see that my feelings/actions were not the norm, I came out to a friend. She pointed out that the only person I had successfully hid it from was myself. "Straight girls don't get crushes on other girls." Wait, not even a little?

I embraced the term "queer", but had a harder time with "bisexual" because "pansexual" is also a valid identity and they two identities often get misinterpreted and even pitted against each other. It's hard to wade into the pool when you don't know the depth of it. I was scared.

The lack of clarity made me hesitate in putting words to my identity, but reading the Bisexual Manifesto helped me find a voice for it: "Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature... In fact, don’t assume that there are only two genders."

As a bisexual cis woman, I feel an attraction to genders similar to and different from my own. I am monogamous and my partner is a cis man, but that does not invalidate who I am, who I've been, nor who I will be. My sexual orientation isn't validated by who I am having sex with.

Part of me wants to delete this thread without posting it. I feel better for writing it, but nervous about sharing it. On the other hand, it's National Coming Out day and I'm doing this to embrace myself, so I'm going to go hit "Tweet all" now.