For many years, I liked to think of myself as a Ming vase wrapped in an elephant hide. Yes, I knew that at my core there was a delicate, fragile heart, but throughout my teens and twenties I had worked hard to encase that part of me in a tough, impenetrable exterior. Abuse me, neglect me, toss me in the trash: it didn’t matter what was done to me, because I’d built up enough defenses to not really care (well, except when I did). I probably don’t have to tell you that this was not the healthiest way to live.
More recently, I’ve been engaged in a project of unwrapping that elephant hide, of holding that Ming vase in my hands and praying that I’ll handle it carefully enough to prevent it from utterly shattering. I’m sure there are rewards to doing this — learning to advocate for your own needs, your own fragility, your own tender heart is supposed to be good for you, right? — but at the same time, it kind of sucks. I sometimes (often) miss my elephant hide, because there’s nothing scarier, nothing more painful, than actually fully allowing myself to feel.
I don’t know how many of you have your own elephant hides, but I’m willing to bet that the majority of you reading this — especially and particularly the bisexual ones — are your own version of Ming vases. How could you not be? Living in a world that is constantly dismissing you, constantly belittling you, constantly negating your own lived truths: it does a number on a person, to say the least.
And indeed, I can see that Ming vase in some of the comments that get left on this newsletter, comments expressing a deep pain, a deep hurt. Sometimes those comments seem like they’re preemptively expecting me to confirm their worst fears — that I’m going to invalidate your bisexuality, or judge you, or tell you the ways that you, personally, don’t belong in my clubhouse (I’m not; the meanest thing you’ll ever hear from me is general indifference to your personal identity, since that’s about you, not me). Other times, they’re all elephant hide: lashing out at perceived “bad” bisexuals in an attempt to stake one’s own claim to “real” bisexuality, enacting the very behaviors I generally advocate against in this newsletter.
Anyway. I cannot tell you how to deal with your bisexual insecurities, how to fully process your own bisexual feelings. These issues — they are on each of us, individually, to figure out the nuances and contours of, they are on each of us, individually, to map out and navigate. You might not actually be a Ming vase in an elephant hide, there might be some other metaphor that more accurately describes your own attempts to cope with the pain of existing in this world. But you are something, and unfortunately, I cannot be the one to figure it out.
What I can tell you, though, is that you aren’t alone in your hurt. We’re all suffering here — even those people you think of as the well-adjusted, confident bisexuals, the ones who seem to have it all figured out, the ones who’ve never had a doubt in their life (indeed, that confident exterior is often a mask obscuring a well of insecurity and doubt). And one of the best things we can do — for ourselves, for our community — is realize it’s not us, the lone suffering bisexual, against a brutal world. It’s all of us, together in our pain, trying to figure things out.