Not to be all “some personal news” but since a couple of weeks ago I announced that I was back in therapy I feel like it would be polite of me to let you all know that therapy is, well, progressing apace. I’m doing okay: my depressive episode lifted less than a week after I started therapy, maybe because I was back in therapy but mostly, I think, because, uh, I’d actually realized and accepted that I was depressed. (That is a quirk of my own brain which is not particularly depression-prone, please don’t read that as some suggestion that depression is something people can will themselves out of.) And for the past two weeks I have been… pretty stable, thankfully, which is good, because it’s vastly easier to do the therapy work I need to do when I have a semblance of emotional and mental stability.
It’s going to take time, I think, but I feel good about my ability to remap all the terrible patterns I’ve learned over the years and come out stronger on the other side. So that’s the update on that. (If you would like to help me pay my therapy bills you are welcome to send me money, therapy continues to be expensive though thankfully I don’t see my therapist every week.)
But this is not a personal newsletter about my mental health, this is a daily newsletter about bisexuals and bisexuality and all of that. So let’s talk about that.
There’s a piece that has been sitting in my tabs (dear lord I have so many open tabs) all week that I finally brought myself to read. I don’t know why it took me so long aside from maybe that reading about bi women being treated badly by the medical system just felt too heavy, too exhausting, to read this week. Like, I’m glad that Ms. is reporting on it, and I hope that it’s a sign that people are really starting to process and pay attention to the fact that bisexuals are, you know, actually facing a real and systemic biphobia, that our problems are more than just “boohoo everyone thinks I’m straight” or the occasional homophobia we face when we’re in visibly queer relationships.
But also sometimes… I’m just tired, you know? Sometimes it is a real bummer to be confronted with the weight, the bleak facts of systemic biphobia. When I first started thinking about it it was exhilarating, the way it can be when you realize that you were abused, when you finally find a name for the badness, a name that offers you a path forward. After a while, though, the exhilaration of naming, of discovery, wears away, and you’re just left with, well, the shittiness, you know?
One of the things I struggle with, too, is that I don’t feel like I can just counteract the bummer of it all with some feel good list of all the great things there are about being bi because, well… in my heart of hearts I don’t think being bi is great? I don’t mean that in some internalized biphobia way, more like… it’s just a way of being, you know? It’s no better or worse than being straight or gay, it just is. Having attractions to multiple genders feels awesome because I am attracted to multiple genders, but if I weren’t, then I don’t think I would miss it, because… I would just be attracted to the one gender I was attracted to.
But I digress. My point is that I get bummed out by the sheer weight, the sheer inescapability, of biphobia, and I don’t feel like I can cheer myself up by being all, “Well isn’t it so cool that I get to have exes with a variety of genitals” because, lol, what. But I don’t think that means that I have to be mired in the bleak forever, or that there is no escape, because —
Well, look. I’ve been doing this newsletter for over six months now (I’m shocked too!), and the thing that keeps me going, the thing that gives me hope, is all of you. Knowing that the things I’m saying make sense to people, that they help people feel seen? That matters so much more to me than some simplistic rah rah list about why it’s great to be bi. What I care about, far beyond some facile biphilia, is the knowledge that I am not alone in this.
We may not know each other. We may never meet each other. But we are together in this experience, and that makes me feel a little less burdened, a little less lonely.
I hope that knowledge can give you the same gift as well.