Julia Shaw

And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities and the past present ideal to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality and to identify problem like sticking points.

Right.

And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present.

And if those were different, so if you said, I wish I was bi, but I'm straight, or I'm bi, but I wish I was straight, or I'm homosexual and I wish I was straight, he would say, let's talk about that.

And he'd try to work through it.

And the term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable in their own sexuality was being a troubled bisexual person.

And so I think any sexuality can be troubled.

I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person.

And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think is really healthy for people to do.

I don't really like talking about honesty with yourself.

I think that's a high bar.

And I think it's also often weaponized against people, especially by men, where it's this idea of you're not really being honest, you're actually gay.

And so I think this idea of we're not being honest with our own sexuality, that's a big word.

I think it's more that maybe you haven't had the right framework or the right words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.

I think the sign is smaller than we think it is.

I think that there's this tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find and keep and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe early 20s.

You maybe get university thrown in.

So if you get your experimental years in undergrad, but then you kind of have to choose.

And that is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people because you can't possibly know all of the things and all the people you might be interested in at that point.

And we change in every other way.