I didn't figure out I wasn't attracted to men until just this year when I was 20 years old. And man has it been a journey. In honor of Pride month, I figured it's time to sit back and reflect.

Before I hit high school, I had only one baby-gay crush, but it should have been so telling. In eighth grade science with Mr. Payne, I was assigned a seat next to this pretty new girl. No big deal. I never talked to anyone in the first place, so I just plopped my books down on the cold black table we shared and started doodling wolves on my lecture notes.

But then that girl smiled at me -- full teeth, a genuine smile -- introduced herself, and offered to shake my hand.

So we did.

Boom. Fireworks

I don't know what that handshake did to me, but it must have flipped some switch in my brain because I spent the next hour feeling...well, feelings I had never felt in the presence of anyone else before. You know how young crushes go; your heart pounds, you can't make eye contact, you get all dopey smiley and you feel like you've caught lightning in a bottle, except your stomach happens to be that bottle. All that electricity, all the nervous energy, it makes you want to puke.

But, because this was a girl and I don't think I even knew what it was to be gay at the time, my stupid 13-year-old self-played it off as social anxiety and tried the best to move on with her life.

So I didn't get the hunch I was bisexual until high school. I remember sitting outside on the hill in my backyard after school, mulling over the fluttery, almost queasy thing I felt when I thought about girls in that sense -- a romantic sense. But I didn't know if it was just the novelty of seeing two women together romantically or, maybe, something else.

The novelty thing came from my recent exposure to LGBTQ+ romance. I had just made a Tumblr and was bombarded with piece after piece of LGBTQ+ fanart for every single TV show imaginable. And I loved it. That type of art turned into, like, half of my entire blog -- female characters holding hands, female characters out on coffee dates. Cutesy stuff. It made me happy, and almost at home -- like when you decorate your dorm room with things that make those blank walls truly yours.

After I caught myself goggling at some girls' short-shorts during college freshman orientation (guilty as charged), I finally mustered the courage to take the bisexual label. Covertly, of course; I was so far away from flaunting my identity like I do today. My parents didn't know until my sophomore year. I came out to both of them in the car, as so many LGBTQ+ people seem to do.

I spent three years with that label, until it felt like a favorite pair of jeans: broken in, comfortable, casual. I got used to bringing it up in conversation. I found bi-pride buttons for my backpack and jacket. I taught myself how to ask girls out -- how to scout their sexualities, how to differentiate friendship from flirting. I taught myself how to get over it when they said they just "didn't see me that way."

The weird thing was, I only ever asked girls out. And, it was just this year that I thought, "Huh. Maybe that might mean something." I've never felt excited and giddy around a man, and while I could flirt with the ladies with the best of 'em, trying to be romantic with dudes just felt... wrong. Scary. My fantasies of entering a relationship with a woman were carefree, all about cuddling, holding hands and laughing together; if I tried to put a man in the picture instead, suddenly that picture wasn't romantic to me at all. All I could think about was all the ways I could mess it up, how I could act wrong on dates or how I would have to pretend to like kissing him. It felt like cramming my feet into a too-small pair of shoes.

Thus, after learning about something called compulsory heterosexuality, I dubbed myself a bona fide lesbian. To this day, my friends, I haven't looked back. It seems to be what fits.

The point of telling you all this, I guess, is that figuring yourself out can take a lot of time. I know it's really tempting to cling to a label, especially with all the LGBTQ+ pride going around right now. Gray areas are scary for everyone. Remember to be open to change, even when you think you've settled on an answer for the tricky question that is your own sexuality.