What my bisexuality taught me about fluidity in all areas of life
For years, I treated my bisexuality like a traffic light. Red meant women, green meant men, and anything in between meant I was confused. I dated a man who made me feel safe and secure, then fell for a woman who made me feel electric and unseen. Instead of allowing both experiences to exist, I searched for the “real” version of myself.
Bisexuality gave me language for that confusion, but it never offered me a traffic light. Attraction can change. The way I express myself can change. A relationship, friendship, career path, or creative ambition can open in a direction I had not anticipated. Fluidity does not mean being directionless; it means being willing to move when something meaningful calls me elsewhere.
The useful part of my bisexual identity reaches well beyond romance. It has shaped how I listen, create, recover, work, and belong. This is an account of what changed when I stopped treating identity as a fixed answer and started treating it as an ongoing relationship with myself.
A label can hold without becoming a box
When I first told people I was bisexual, I felt as though I had handed them a manual explaining every part of me. Some people interpreted it as proof that I was sexually confused. Others assumed I had tried everything and found women preferable. A few behaved as though my attraction to men was the real, respectable part and my attraction to women was an experimental detour.
The label gave me freedom, but it also invited assumptions. I learned to say “bisexual” without turning it into a confession, explanation, or promise. That sentence sounds small, yet it changed how I entered relationships and friendships. People became individuals rather than possible evidence for or against a fixed identity.
Bisexuality also taught me to separate attraction, behaviour, and identity. I can be attracted to someone without pursuing a relationship. I can identify as bisexual while living mostly in heterosexual relationships. I can be monogamous, partnered, single, or casually dating. None of those arrangements erases the identity, and none of them has to match anyone else’s timetable.
In Melbourne, my daily routine takes place among laneway cafés where reusable cups, flat whites, and conversations with baristas are ordinary parts of the scene. I used to worry about whether my manner, clothing, or confidence seemed “lesbian enough” in one space and “straight enough” in another. Eventually, I realised nobody needed to perform a gender for my coffee order. The small relief of ordering exactly what I wanted felt unexpectedly radical.
Attraction can move without your value changing
There have been periods when my attraction felt obvious and periods when it barely registered. There have also been years in which one gender received most of my attention without making the other side disappear. Trying to rank my attractions felt like a betrayal of the people I loved and a waste of my own energy.
People often expect bisexuality to mean equal attraction at all times. That expectation makes no sense to me. Our histories, bodies, hormones, relationships, and emotional circumstances influence who catches our attention. A connection with one person says nothing definitive about the next. Attraction can be intense, specific, temporary, or recurring, and it can still be sincere every time.
Bisexual people are also pushed to prove themselves in opposite directions. Some heterosexual people treat attraction to women as a phase, while some queer spaces treat bisexual women as suspiciously straight and bisexual men as a threat. I have had to become my own witness rather than borrowing credibility from either community. Being visible matters, but visibility is not the same as acceptance.
At Sydney’s Mardi Gras on Oxford Street, I have felt both welcomed and scrutinised within minutes. The crowds can feel like a promise that many kinds of love are possible, yet a particular kind of couple can still appear to represent everyone. Living as a bisexual person has taught me that community needs more than rainbow clothing and good intentions. The weekly newsletter shares reflections that often make me feel less isolated in navigating those gaps.
The body remembers what the mind is learning
During eating-disorder recovery, my body became another arena where rigid stories played out. If I did not look a certain way, I worried that I was failing to communicate the right kind of attraction. If my appetite changed, I wondered what that meant about my identity. Logic offered no relief because the fear was stored in my body.
My bisexuality has helped me separate desire from obligation. I do not owe anyone a body, reaction, sexual response, or performance. Consent is active and specific, including with people I know well and people I find very attractive. The freedom to discover what I want includes the freedom to say no, to need time, and to change my mind.
Anxiety has added another layer. When my mind becomes crowded with predictions, a flexible identity can sound frighteningly unanchored. Therapy has given me ways to question those predictions without judging them. In Australia, a GP can provide a mental health treatment plan for Medicare-subsidised psychology sessions, a practical step that made ongoing care feel possible when private fees felt inaccessible.
Recovery has not taught me to become endlessly changeable. It has taught me to notice when change is growth and when it is fear wearing a convincing disguise. Sometimes I am experimenting; sometimes I am avoiding discomfort; sometimes I am simply tired. Fluidity becomes healthier when I remain accountable to myself rather than treating every shift as automatically liberating.
Work, creativity, and identity can shift together
My working life has involved changing how I am perceived: the reserved person in one room, the confident person in another, the reliable employee on weekdays and the chaotic friend at a gig on Friday. These versions overlap. The parts of me that once felt contradictory are now simply different contexts responding to different needs.
Writing has taught me that identity cannot be separated from audience. I can tell a personal story, publish it, and watch strangers reduce it to a slogan. The essay the truth about blogging captures the tension between making something public and allowing it to remain complicated. Visibility gives a story reach, but it can also create pressure to become more polished than I am.
Creativity gives those contradictions somewhere to move. In Melbourne’s live music scene, I have watched bands alter their sound, instruments, lyrics, and stage roles without treating the original version as a failure. A person can write a folk song, experiment with electronic production, join a punk band, and still be recognisably themselves. The work changes; the person driving it does not have to disappear.
My own creative projects have followed that pattern. An essay might begin with mental health and end with social justice. A podcast episode might hold anxiety, music, and humour in the same conversation. I used to worry that changing subjects meant abandoning a clear artistic identity. Now I understand that a clear voice can hold many subjects without making them identical.
Practices that make room for change
Personal fluidity is only one part of change. Relationships, workplaces, friendship groups, and community organisations can require people to be fixed in ways that feel artificial. A flexible identity still needs supportive structures, especially when other people have already made assumptions about who someone is.
I look for signs that a space can adapt to different experiences and changing needs.
- Names, pronouns, and personal details are treated as information people may need to update.
- Assumptions about couples, dating, and attraction are not treated as facts.
- Feedback is welcomed without punishing the person brave enough to offer it.
- Boundaries can change without someone being labelled disloyal or difficult.
- People are allowed to revise their plans, roles, goals, and definitions of success.
- Mistakes lead to adjustment rather than demands for permanent compliance.
I also ask whether a relationship or institution can describe its values through actions instead of slogans. Flexibility becomes more than a personal virtue when it is reflected in ordinary policies and habits.
- A workplace has a clear process for updating records and sharing relevant details.
- Meetings do not reward a fixed style of confidence over every other form of contribution.
- Time-off and flexibility policies accommodate care, disability, and changing family circumstances.
- Group leaders make room for quieter feedback rather than rewarding only the loudest voices.
- New members can understand the organisation’s purpose without needing to erase their own needs.
- Accountability includes listening to the people affected by a decision.
Change becomes more personal and more collective when I stop demanding that every space become perfectly inclusive and start looking for concrete evidence that it can change. I keep the make a change section for essays about turning awareness into participation rather than leaving every difficult conversation in private.
One honest step at a time
The greatest lesson my bisexuality gave me was permission to be unfinished. That permission has not erased the anxiety that can accompany uncertainty. It has simply given me another way to meet it: without turning one choice, relationship, or phase into the permanent shape of my life.
I still need conversations, boundaries, and accountability. Fluidity without responsibility can become avoidance, while rigidity can become cruelty dressed as principle. The work is to remain open to revision without abandoning the people and values that matter to me.
Tomorrow morning, I will sit at the kitchen table with a flat white, open a fresh page, and write the sentence I have been avoiding: I am allowed to change without apologising for the change.
