back when i thought i was bisexual (spoiler alert- i wasn't)

what isolation and unsupervised internet does to a teen

During the late covid lockdown, I had an incredible discovery about myself. A discovery that made me question my entire 14 years of life and changed my personality beyond repair.

I was bisexual, or so I thought.

Well, how did I find out?

From a tiktok video of course!! (Incredible source of information. Nobody use it please!)

(Couldn’t find the original video, but here is an example)

After watching hundreds of videos of this kind 14 years old tomboy me thought, “Oh yeah!!! I’m definitely attracted to girls too, I am FOR SURE a bisexual”.

In my defense, I was a teen surviving a lockdown with her almost strict brown family, while navigating the new found freedom of using the internet without any adult supervision.

Terrible combination. Trust. Me.

Plus, since I was a tomboy it did also contribute to my discovery. My “boyish” side was constantly pointed out by my family and relatives, saying things like “maybe you were supposed to be a boy, unfortunate that you turned out to be a girl”.

And the said “boyish” side was just my preference towards men’s sandals because they were more comfortable than women’s and my stubbornness to keep my hair short because I had too much hair and it would make my head and neck ache (now my vitamin and iron deficiency took away most of it, but hey at least I don’t get neck aches anymore).

To add to this, that was the time around when the people of lgbtq+ community started coming out and people started accepting them. Sure there were never ending debates about all that (still is), but 14 year old me could only account for the side that received acceptance and validation.

Now that I have grown up I realise that, it wasn’t me being bisexual, it was me craving attention, validation and acceptance from the people of the internet. Why? Because getting it from home was more difficult than coming out as bisexual on the internet.

Anyways, after the great discovery my personality started changing. For better or for worse, which one is it? I still don’t know because even now I’m still changing, evolving, growing or whatever you guys say (hence why I rebrand my publication thrice a week). Being stuck at home during covid gave me too much time and unlimited internet access, which, again is a dangerous combination. Especially for someone who has the tendency to overthink and overanalyse everything.

However, after covid, I realised I wasn’t actually bisexual. Then I thought, maybe I was asexual. And then, I realised I was just… straight.

That realization felt disappointing. As, by then I had internalised the idea that being “different” was what made someone interesting, valid, or worthy of being heard. And if I wasn’t different, then maybe I wasn’t enough (thanks for that tiktok).

And trust me, I grilled myself a lot for this, but now I don’t anymore. Because now I understand that, trying on identities didn’t mean I was pretending or attention seeking. It meant I was young, isolated, and trying to understand myself in a world that constantly shifts their attention to what is in trend.

To be clear, this isn’t a dismissal of people who genuinely discovered themselves during that time. I’m glad for them. Truly. For many, that period offered safety, and self-recognition they didn’t have before.

My experience was simply different. What I mistook for self-discovery was just a desire to belong to something meaningful, to be seen in a world that often reduces people to labels. That doesn’t make those identities less real. It just means mine hadn’t settled yet. And I was young, so let’s consider that too.

If anything, that phase taught me how fragile identity can feel when it’s shaped by isolation, algorithms, and the quiet pressure to be “interesting.” Which kind of happened during covid to a lot of people, which also, undermined the struggles of people who were truly in conflict with their identity.

This served as a lesson for me though.

I learned that not every phase needs a label to be valid, and not every uncertainty needs to become an identity. Some moments are just detours from the actual destination. And outgrowing them doesn’t mean they were pointless, it just means they did their job. And now I have to do mine.