Summer is a very important season for me. It’s my birthday season, it gives me a long well deserved break from school, I get to spend time with my friends and it allows me to take time for myself. Birthday presents are great, but having a period of time I can devote to myself has been monumental in constructing the person I am proud to be today.

When I have time to focus on myself, I grow a lot. I just find that when I start to reflect on my thoughts, feelings and experiences, I listen to myself and discover what I need in order to become a healthier “me.” Summer 2014 I was 16, and I had discovered that I desperately needed to come out.

I always knew that I had some sort of attraction to girls, which confused me for most of my life since I was also attracted to guys. “Gay” to me had always meant being exclusively attracted to your own sex, and that was definitely not what I felt I was. So, if I wasn’t gay and I wasn’t straight, then what was I?

The word bisexual never struck me as something positive. Granted, neither did gay. People who are queer of course don’t choose to be different. It’s hard to be different, so why would we deliberately put ourselves into that situation? The thing with bisexuality was that it came across as a pretty bad thing to both straight and gay people. The fear of being alienated by not just straight people, but fellow queers as well is what made me so hesitant to ever identify as bisexual.

I had seen the “slutty, bisexual girl” in the TV shows and movies I had grown up watching. I had heard straight people tell her it was just a “phase” and queer people tell her she wasn’t “gay enough.” I didn’t want to be that girl.

I think one of the most important things a queer person has to think about is coming out to close friends and family. Thankfully, I was surrounded by a supportive and socially active group of friends (majority who ended up being queer as well). However, I don’t come from a family that would rejoice at finding out they had a queer child. Thinking about their reactions and the consequences led me to decide that I would never come out to them.

It’s a difficult decision to make, to decide that you will refrain from sharing a huge part of your life from your family. I came to that decision because of many reasons, but one of the biggest being I didn’t know how to communicate to my parents the concept of “bisexuality” in terms they would fully understand.

Queer vocabulary is just being newly introduced into the Spanish language, and even then it’s not accessible to most Latinx. Bisexuals have to exist in a this or that world. My family would have a hard time understanding that I wasn’t this or that and I just don’t think I have the patience to constantly be explaining my sexuality to them because I get so much of that in my everyday life already.

I don’t like calling myself bisexual because both straight and queer people have a very strict definition of what that means. Most tend to think of it as being attracted to both men and women equally, but I don’t see it that way. I use bisexuality as a sort of umbrella term to align myself as basically not being monosexual. Gender doesn’t play a role in my attraction, so I find myself attracted to more than just men and women.

Well isn’t that just pansexual?

I guess it could be considered pansexual, but I don’t identify with that. I’m bisexual because how I feel matches with how I define the word. That’s how I use it and every bisexual person has their own way of using it.

My attraction also isn’t something that is split evenly. I don’t think it’s possible to measure attraction by percentages or fractions. There are days when I feel more attracted to one gender than another and there are days when it’s completely flipped.

Usually when people ask about my sexuality, I just say I’m queer. Sometimes people just leave it at that, but there are those instances when folks just keep asking and asking me about it, trying to pinpoint exactly what my sexuality is. Bottom line is, it’s not something I ever expect anyone to understand. All I ask for from both queers and straights is to see it as legitimate. I don’t expect them to get it. It’s my identity, so who better to understand it than me?

So yeah, summer. Summer is great. One summer I overcame all my fears and decided to do what was best for me. It hasn’t been an easy road and I don’t expect it to be. The important thing to realize is that coming out made me a happier person. It’s now summer 2016 and I’m still learning new things about myself and I'm still figuring out what's best for me. You can catch me doing the same next summer.