The Someone out there.
How on a cold August day I realised that representation of neurodivergence helped to keep me upright and sane in adolescence.
Working out my sexuality in adulthood was weird as fuck.
Yeah, I’m not about to bury the lede in a 3500+ word essay: I’m bisexual and demisexual. I also have ADD/ADHD.
Hold on to your hats, this is a long one.
As an adolescent I figured I was operating with the same default settings and assumptions of the rest of the world. While I was intelligent enough to know that there was a bit of variation in the world beyond the ‘man + woman + children + pets’ standard prevalent in the media, variation seemed kind of rare. Whenever I encountered people – either in person or via media – that didn’t fit the norm it felt like a significant occasion. I remember knowing that it was rude to do so, but really wanting to stare at people who didn’t fit the norm, almost examining them in scientific detail. Never in a negative manner, but more in awe. I thought they were magnificent, and I wanted to understand how to have the courage to be that magnificent too.
There are occasional moments I remember from my childhood where I recognised that I needed to imitate normal as much as possible. Either I felt like I would be safer if I appeared to fit in, or it would be an easier existence if I conformed. Whichever way, it was a performance. It was not me just honestly existing as me.
Mostly I’d push away the recognition of ‘not being normal’, slide close that mental compartment door and not deal with it. It was always there, that feeling of being separate from people, but it was usually something that I could dismiss. Maybe I was normal, but perhaps I was also just a bit anxious!
I was weird in primary school, but there I slowly evolved into my weird. When I started high school, I was weird from the get-go. I hadn’t moved on to the same high school as my primary school classmates; instead, I bussed to the public high school that hosted the academic extension program my older sister had been accepted into.
At orientation day I was immediately aware of my individualness. Most of the year seven students attending that day all wore the primary school uniforms of the local schools, or if they wore a different uniform, they were also enrolled in the academic extension program or the visual arts program. I fronted up as the only student from my primary school, not knowing the cliques and the common stories. I was in academic gen-pop, with a kind of middle ground intelligence, and just existed. I made a couple of acquaintances before I made any friends.
Academically I was simultaneously crap, reasonable, or brilliant. In retrospect, you could see that when something interested me, I’d be all in, and I’d be bloody good. If I wasn’t interested, I could get terrible grades. I would feel overwhelming guilt about those grades, but it wouldn’t make me more successful in my efforts. Sometimes it just took a while for a skill to stick, but there were also teachers who could successfully teach me, and teachers that never could. My year nine mathematics teacher was one of the latter. If I didn’t understand his explanation of a mathematical principle, then I was shit out of luck, because that was the only way he’d teach it. In mathematics I went from an A student to an F student just by moving to the next year group. Same school, same buildings, but year nine, not year 8.
At the time, no one else seemed to question it, so why would I? I remember going to the school year counsellor and asking them if I should move down to a less skilled mathematics class, but I don’t remember anything happening. I just dropped from an A to an F, and that was how it was. I never really regained the small amount of confidence I felt in mathematics after that, just assuming that I’d be crap at it, and let the guilt take root.
When I moved out of home, I took all my life paperwork with me. In amongst redundant superannuation correspondence and 15-year-old bank statements ready for destruction I found my school reports from primary and high school. I distinctly remember shredding them in an attempt to wipe the overwhelming shame I felt just by seeing them.
I can still tell you what those reports said though.
“Kelly needs to pay attention more in class.”
“Kelly shows promise but needs to apply herself more.”
“Kelly needs to focus on her own work and not that of her classmates.”
I’m sure that there were positive points made, but you never remember those, do you? Only the negative points burn into your psyche.
I was an avid reader from way back. As well as constantly reading fiction and the non-fiction related to whatever hyperfixation I had developed, I’d read daily newspapers, plus the weekly popular newspapers and news magazines. Regularly there would be a profile of someone who “struggled at school but thrived in business/ professional sports/ the creative arts”. It always gave me a bit of hope that while I might be a mediocre fuckup at school, I could potentially be the ‘successful despite’ person one day. I never thought I’d be famous with a profile published in the Saturday paper, but I’d at least become someone with a fulfilling career, with a house, a car, maybe even a pet.
The articles would recount a thirty, forty, or fifty-something adult who had a learning difficulty like dyslexia, or dyscalculia and would have benefited from special accommodations back when they were in school but never had a diagnosis until they were well into adulthood.
I knew that I didn’t have any of those difficulties. Those were actual difficulties.
I was just a regular kid, who was told by many a teacher that I wasn’t trying hard enough. That I didn’t have any discipline. That if I were honest with myself, I’d just buckle down, study hard and then I’d do better in the exams at the end of the year. And every time I happened to do really well in a subject, it was clearly because I had taken a teacher’s advice and finally applied myself.
When I was 45 it was confirmed that while I might not have suffered dyslexia or dyscalculia, I did have attention deficit disorder. ADD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as it’s also called, is a supply deficiency of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. It’s not a moral failing; it’s insufficient brain chemicals.
Most of the kids who also had trouble in school alongside me probably also had ADHD. My ADHD was the inattentive type, and when I was a kid ADD/ADHD was predominantly only diagnosed in boys, particularly if they had the hyperactive type. It’s easier to diagnose a kid who cannot sit still as ADHD than to diagnose someone like me who perpetually had their face stuck in massive novels.
By the time I received my ADHD diagnosis I more understood why in childhood I’d felt awkwardly separate from other people. ADD/ADHD explained a bit of my weird in school, but it didn’t explain all of it. I wasn’t a particularly social kid. I was quiet, with a small, safe, friend group. I was less bullied at high school than primary, but there were always a few specific fellow students I would try and avoid. It wasn’t until Years 11 and 12, when high school attendance ceased to be compulsory that I really felt comfortable at school. Anyone who remained enrolled in school wanted to be there – or were continuing to suffer but had zero desire to upset their parents – and weren’t inclined to take their frustrations out on their fellow students.
During adolescence and early to mid-adulthood I never encountered in real life or depicted positively in media anyone who was openly bisexual. When bisexuality was depicted in media; literary or visual, it was rare, and the bisexual character was never in an easy, loving and long-lasting relationship, either straight or queer presenting.
Bisexual people were almost always: hypersexual people who were never going to have vanilla missionary sex, instead they’d be in a threesome within 15 minutes of meeting their partners or a participant in a hedonistic orgy. If a character was outwardly bisexual and not closeted, they were almost always also the villain. The bisexual male partner in a straight presenting relationship was almost guaranteed to be closeted, actively sleeping with at least one other man; and the loving but oblivious wife would carry on none the wiser, until she discovered she had a sexually transmitted disease. The most positive depiction of the bisexual would be the character that really was “lying to everyone and themselves; and were only saying they were bisexual because they were on the way to [accepting they were really] gay”.
In the mid to late 1990s, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras refused to accept bisexual people as members limiting their potential participation in the annual Mardi Gras parade. Considering Mardi Gras was one of the few queer events that was broadcast on Australian television, that there was deliberate action that prevented honest representation of actual bisexual people feels completely absurd.
At school if you presented any indication of ‘not being normal’ you were at risk in some form. Statistically there was absolutely a queer population in my primary school and high school, but I completely understand why no kid was openly queer during the early to mid-nineties at my relatively large Western Australian public high school. There, if someone called you gay it was intended as a slur. Weirdly, I never thought much of it, because if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I wasn’t a lesbian. I mean: have you seen men? Damn.
That said, I didn’t really crush on people, not the way you’d read about or see in movies. To be honest, I always assumed “falling in lust with one look across a crowded dance floor” was a literary trope used by writers to progress a plot faster.
It was only in the last decade – well into my marriage – that I came across the concept of demisexuality. The description was the ‘difficulty in developing sexual attraction to someone without initially developing an emotional connection’. That definition described me far better than anything else. I had to consider someone interesting before I could even contemplate kissing them, let alone having sex.
The word demisexuality sat quietly with me for a fair while. Having a definition; a label, was sort of soothing. Even though I didn’t feel it necessary to vocally claim that label, knowing that while I wasn’t ‘default settings’ in heteronormative terms, I really was normal. Yes, I was an outlier, but there existed a definition that fit.
Sometime after, I was discussing books with a friend, and we got onto Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I’d seen the blurb sometime around its initial release, borrowed the book from the library, but only managed about a chapter before I DNFed it. My friend recommended I try it again, and because our reading tastes are very similar, I did. She was right, and it was a delight, but there was one passage in the fifth chapter that made me stop and dissociate for a good five minutes. One of the two main characters, Alex, is processing his thoughts while he goes for a run, a DIY therapy technique that I had adopted quite regularly;
“...They’re rounding the corner for their eighth lap now, and he’s starting to see some flaws in his logic. Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves they’re straight...”
Thoughts will percolate in my head, fermenting and ripening over time. I’ll go on and continue to live my life while something somewhere in my brain maps out ideas and concepts that I’ve had. At a quiet point it will push something to the front of my mind and present it. It’ll be a question, a clarification, a request for permission to forage around in a connected concept. One day it presented me with a newly completed puzzle I had been previously unaware of.
If you ever complete a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, you start by assembling all the edge pieces, and then as you start to build onto those edge pieces you begin to match up random pieces that have the same colours; all the bits of blue sky, all the green lawn, the section of wall that is a slightly different shade of blue to the sky. The green of the trees vs the green of the hedgerow. There’s somehow always a puzzle piece of sky that you’re 100 percent sure is a piece of wall, and a piece that somehow has a splash of colour that for the life of you can’t be matched to the box picture. You scatter around the slowly assembling jigsaw those little clumps of two, three and four clicked together pieces while you match other pieces up and await the larger picture.
All my life I knew I was bisexual and simultaneously all my life I’d had no idea. I had always felt an immediate ease, comfort and sense of place being amongst queer people. The empathy I felt for queer characters in media was often far out of proportion to the amount of participation the queer character had in the story. I never understood the ease of my high school classmates in the girl’s locker room getting changed before and after PE; how could they be so casual and have in-depth conversations using full eye contact while we were all half naked changing clothes? I’d be awkwardly bowing my head, careful to not look at anyone in the change rooms until we were all fully dressed, while they’re all yapping away with zero embarrassment.
I absolutely had crushes on girls, but I never understood them as crushes. While there was definitely some hero worship in amongst those crushes, because I’d never felt that ‘hot and bothered’ about anyone, I assumed that they were all just me being awed. I was more recognizant of crushes on guys. I think my main criteria for guys was focused on whether they gave off a chill vibe, and that they felt like they would be safe people. I recently saw another demisexual describe their crushes more as friendship crushes. They didn’t think that someone was hot as hell, they thought that they were cool as hell. If they could be that person’s friend? Life goal achieved.
In 2004 the Liam Neeson film Kinsey was released. That was my first real introduction to the Kinsey scale developed in the 1940s by Albert Kinsey and his fellow researchers at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. It’s a rating system from zero to six, where zero is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual. The numbers 1 through 5 depict bisexuality with a nuance, moving from one as ‘predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual’ through three as ‘equally heterosexual and homosexual’, on to five being ‘predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual’. It has serious flaws related to its age, but it was still helpful to me in developing that initial understanding of my bisexuality. I understood that ‘normalcy’ or those default settings was that thin column of heterosexuality at the edge, and I was clearly not that. I probably floated between a 1 to on occasion up to 3 on the Kinsey scale.
When my subconscious surfaced the possibility that I might be bisexual, I both recognised the likelihood of the fact and also slightly dismissed that it was of any importance. I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with my husband since 2009 and married since 2011; my potential bisexuality seemed sort of irrelevant. As time went on, and my subconscious processed what my sexuality meant and how it had shaped me, I know I was affected. Around the same time, I moved to a new job and workplace after 15 years, and that change completely stripped away any comfort zone I had cultivated. Emotions started bubbling so violently under the surface, on occasion I was surprised that I managed to sound normal and not like I was about to burst into tears. I so desperately wanted to talk to my husband about it all, but I felt like it was an insurmountable task only fraught with danger, not potential relief. Time after time I would open my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
My husband recognised that I was distressed and gently suggested that perhaps I should seek some psychotherapy. He has dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since adolescence and has greatly benefitted from therapy and related treatments. The same night he suggested it, I Googled a psychotherapy practice a few hundred metres from my work, emailed them requesting that they place me with a psychologist “willing to call me on my shit”, as well as taking the first available appointment the next day to see my general practitioner for a Medicare Mental Health Plan referral as well.
At the start of my fourth therapy appointment, I told my psychologist that I’d come out as bisexual to my husband. Considering that I hadn’t mentioned that part of me to her by that point, she was mildly surprised. (My dad had suffered a pretty catastrophic fall at his home five days before therapy appointment number two, so we were kind of busy dealing with my having to activate the Powers of Attorney and Guardianship I held for my father, what his recovery in hospital looked like, the process of moving him directly from the high dependency unit in hospital to a general ward and then into aged care, and then working out how we were going to pay for said aged care while my sister and I arranged for his house to be sold. It wasn’t the funnest time in my life.)
My psychologist used a form of therapy called schema and had previously pointed out that I fitted the subjugation and self-sacrifice schemas. Being both pretty introspective and fairly decisive when it seemed necessary, I had been mentally cataloguing my life and correcting for those schemas where I could see an easy fix. Not voicing my whole truth to my husband was going to execute my marriage at some point and avoiding that certain death was worth the uncomfortable decision to come out to him.
In late August this year, ex-Australian Rules footballer Mitch Brown came out as bisexual. I have a vivid memory of being bent over my phone, scrolling Instagram and seeing this post of him saying “I played in the AFL for 10 years, and I’m a bisexual man.” I was kind of shocked. I was delighted, but shocked.
Statistically, bisexuals make up the majority of all LGBTQ+ people – indeed, the number of bisexual people outnumbers all others combined; that one through five on the Kinsey scale was nuanced for good reason. Outwardly however, your bisexuality is generally seen by others as either homosexuality or heterosexuality because of whom you love. If you’re a bisexual woman in a relationship with a cis or trans woman or a femme presenting non-binary person, you’re a lesbian. Conversely, if you’re in love with a cis or trans man, or a masculine presenting person, you’re deemed to be heterosexual. Bisexuality is never the assumption; the assumption is always one of the monosexualities. It’s called ‘bi erasure’, or ‘bi phobia’.
Logically, there were bound to be bisexuals other than Mitch Brown playing in the men’s AFL, but I imagine in that environment if you have that straight-presenting privilege, it would be easy to just let your sexuality lie quietly. No one needs to know, needs to be aware that at some point in your life you’ve probably looked at someone of the same gender as yourself, and felt so attracted to them you blushed while you felt your stomach drop to your knees.
That Mitch was brave enough to stand up and essentially say “Hey; I might be in a straight presenting relationship but I’m not remotely straight” just utterly floored me. Until that moment, I did not realise how much I needed someone out there like me. Someone who stood up and was willing to be The Bisexual Person in Australian Sports Media.
And that was the exact moment I realised neurodivergent representation was what kept me relatively sane and alive in adolescence. Because every instance when I had felt awkward and separate and slightly distressed, I had just chalked them up to my being the directionless lazy shit for brains that I’d internalised to be the truth. But I also knew to my bones that I would be OK – because I’d read the articles and profiles and watched the TV interviews – that there were millions of other people just like me out there, and they had also been overwhelmingly shithouse at school, and they had also unutterably fucked their mid-year exams and subsequently their end of year exams year on every fucking year, and they were now adults: alive, upright, earning a wage, and OK.
If my bisexuality hadn’t been subdued for most of my life through my demisexuality, I’m not sure that I would have survived high school in the 1990s as relatively unscathed as I did, and I can’t say I was wholly unscathed.
Society now seems to recognise more and more that while the historically Christian patriarchal heteronormativity might be the majority, it certainly isn’t the norm. There remains, however, pockets of ignorance and hate that perpetually burn like an underground coal mine fire. I imagine that if you feel you’re queer and stuck deep in that pocket of ignorance and hate, having someone Visibly Out There Somewhere giving you a modicum of hope is a strong pull towards survival.
Representation matters more than you realise, and sometimes it isn’t until you’re 47 years of age scrolling Instagram on a cold August day that you recognise how much it was necessary for you to have survived childhood.