On Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2016, it was a holiday. It was National Coming Out Day, and on this day, my best friend told me she was bisexual, and that she was dating a female.
I want to start by saying that I have NEVER had problems or anything against anyone with a sexual orientation that is different than mine. Throughout high school and my first years of college, I have had friends with sexual preferences that have ranged from A to Z. What made this particular situation so surprising was that the facts I knew to be true about my best friend were now slightly altered. We had drooled over boys together, chased boys together, flirted with boys together, you get the picture, we loved boys! Now, the situation was changing. It all came as such a shock to me, and it was hard to picture my best friend with another girl. She went on in this essay of a text to tell me that she always knew, since her kindergarten days, that she liked both boys and girls. Did I miss something? Should I have known? She was my best friend, and I was only now discovering this huge part of her life, so everything was going to be different, right?
Wrong. Nothing was going to change. Absolutely nothing about our friendship would be altered in anyway because of her bisexuality. She was still the same intelligent, adventurous, giving, complete wild-child that I knew her to be. We learn new things about our friends and family every day. As they grow, we grow with them. As she grew to be comfortable enough to come out as bisexual, I was lucky enough to be by her side to grow with her. I was being introduced to a new part of my best friend, but like all of her others, it would be something I loved.
Best friends are supposed to tell each other everything. A best friend is someone you can put complete trust in. It is someone that you can tell absolutely anything to, and know in the back of your mind that they will still accept you and embrace you with all of their love. The thought of my best friend ever feeling nervous or ashamed to tell me something as big as this, something that is literally a part of who she is, breaks my heart. The fact that she can love both males and females will never change the fact that she is a beautiful soul. It does not change our similarities, our bond, or the memories that we have together. It does not mean that we can no longer relate to one another, and it does not mean that she can no longer be my wing-woman. It means that get to know my best friend even further.
I’m sure that by the title of this article you thought that I would be writing about how my friend coming out to me impacted our friendship greatly. The moral of the story is that it did not, and it never will. The moral of the story is that love is love, and I will always love my best friend.