By Gia Choquette
I am writing this two days before turning 30, which I feel is an especially important transitional moment to reflect on my life and my identity. In addition to being a bisexual woman (I use pansexual and queer to describe myself, too, but feel most happy and at home with the bi label), I am also on the asexual spectrum. Holding both these identities together has informed the way I move through the world and see myself. While I am able to experience strong romantic and aesthetic attraction to people of all genders, I feel extremely neutral toward sex and always have. I could absolutely go my whole life never having sex with anyone and be very happy, and I would probably prefer that. A likely early sign of my asexuality was when I wrote an entry in my journal at age 13 in which I imaged my ideal life as an adult in my thirties, planning to live alone in a cottage by the woods with some cats and be a writer. I did not picture myself partnered, married, or sleeping with anyone. Now that I am approaching the age I imagined in my journal entry, it turns out I am partnered and living with my boyfriend. We don’t live in a cottage by the woods, but we do have a cat and I do enjoy writing. So, I am not too far off from the life I imagined at 13.
What I did not realize about myself at age 13 that I do know to be true of my identity now is that I am both bi and ace. I think an important and beautiful part of bisexuality is its ability to create space for and hold seemingly binary and contradictory concepts and weave them together in a way that proudly and creatively allows for the complexity of bothness. There is a lot of power and radical potential in the word “both,” especially in a world that often uses binaries to categorize and control people. In a similar manner, this worldview has empowered and enabled me to incorporate “bothness” into many aspects of my identity. I am attracted to both people with genders similar to and different from my own. I am both bisexual and pansexual. I am both bi and ace. I absolutely adore Robyn Och’s definition of bisexuality in which she says:
“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually to people of more than one gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree. For me, the “bi” in “bisexual” refers to the potential for attraction to people with genders similar to and different from my own.”
This is how I define my own bisexuality, emphasizing each part of the definition and particularly, in regard to my asexuality, the “romantically and/or sexually” part. I hope that as I enter my thirties, I will continue exploring the many multifaceted ways of being bisexual, asexual, and human.
Gia Choquette is a special education teaching assistant, currently working on her M.A. in Counseling Psychology with a focus on School Counseling at Lesley University. She lives with her boyfriend and their cat, Nyx, in central Massachusetts, U.S.