Things you're interested in that you never thought you would be at a younger age.

For me, I've taken on a more spiritual lifestyle since I was last active on KHV (2011), experiencing and appreciating the world and its inhabitants from a different view. I probably sound like a druggy, but meditation and art has helped me see everything in a much more positive manner. Never thought I'd be into that when I was 14-15. Took life for granted until my Aunt died, who was the only extended family I was really close to.

What about you guys?

 

Probably religion. Not that I'm a super religious person or anything, but it's interesting to talk about religion and even argue about it to some who have opposite views about it. Younger wise, I hated religion due to being a pain it was to explain it to people who had no idea about it.

 

Sports, of all things.
When I was little, I was told to pick a team even though I really didn't watch football at all. It wasn't until a few years ago that I started watching it and understanding what was going on, and now I'm really interested in it. Now I really like watching the game, keeping up with the scores, and cheering on my team, go figure.

 

Critical analysis. Like, really looking at all of the details of things that I or others enjoy. I never thought I'd become so interested in why people enjoy what they do, or conversely, don't enjoy them. Now it's frustrating when someone says something along the lines of "I don't know (why I do/don't like this). I just do." It feels so lazy to me. I want explanation; it really helps me understand people when they do give explanations. Unless those explanations are weak.

Also, I tend to be able to word things better than many of my friends and family. I wasn't interested in essays or writing as a kid, but now I've found it to probably be my strongest suite.

 

Sex, drugs, and the fine points of mathematics. Basketball is a big interest now while Soccer was my sport as a child.

I used to hate history, but since I graduated and did my own reading, it's fascinating to learn about how the world came to be where it is.

I would say politics, but I don't have an interest in that so much as I care about the state the world I live in ends up in.

 

well younger me didn't think i'd be interested in boys

but here we are

more seriously tho, i didn't think i'd be into foreign languages but i'm like obsessed with them rn lol

tbh i listen to more foreign music [ french, korean, japanese rarely ] now than american

and i'm much more fascinated by them than i could have imagined when i was younger

 

My music taste is the first thing that comes to mind. As a child I was mostly into pop-punk and some hardcore (I'm sure a few people here remember my Rise Against phase), and I do still partake when the mood suits, but it's opened up to things I never thought I'd dig when I was younger. I always knew I liked electronic stuff, but most of the ambient, hip hop, dream pop, and freak folk would have been quickly discarded ten years ago.

I also thought Star Wars was for nerds... then I saw it and we all know where that landed me

 

Y'all should get back into Rise Against >.>

Also, I'm curious if you were always considering other females romantically. It's ok if that's too much to answer.

 

I still do listen to Rise Against from time to time! It's mostly a mood thing. I do need to catch up on their post-Sufferer releases, though.

Hah, loaded question. I considered addressing it given @Beau 's response but chose not to... but I also know it's something I've discussed in bits and pieces several times before but never really fully addressed -- which I don't really plan to here, either, but to give a general idea, I've always had a bit of a suspicion. When I was in elementary school I did have a bit of a crush on a boy for a year or two, but after he found out in the third grade (I remember the day quite clearly, passing post-its during lessons like the eight-year-old badass I was) it pretty much dissipated, especially because the next year I met a girl who I was a bit obsessed with. It wasn't anything... creepy, like "I'm-going-to-follow-you-home" type obsessed, but I thought about her a lot and we had this sort of teasing & pretending to hate each other friendship that, upon reflection, probably explains the PB/Marceline obsession... I still kept up the idea that I was crushin' on the aforementioned boy and even invented a (male) celebrity crush for myself; it seemed like that was what I was supposed to be doing at that age, rather than reflective of any kind of interest or attraction.

Through middle school it dipped down a bit since I lost touch with the girl I was talking about (though when I saw her from time to time it would crop up again), but I do have vivid memories of sitting next to a girl in 7th grade Spanish and being just really attracted to her and not having any idea why or what was going on with me. I would soon comfort myself with the reassurance that it was just curiosity and everyone was a little gay during puberty and I would grow into the nice straight lady I was meant to be.

High school it also became less of a concern, I wouldn't say because it wasn't there but it wasn't really my top concern. I started to confront a lot of other, unrelated things during that time, mostly involving my parents' divorce and how I never really dealt with it, so romance wasn't really top of the list. I did see the girl from elementary school a lot one year, because we had pretty much every class together, and it felt like a normal friendship to me so I didn't really think much of it. In my senior year I also fell pretty hard for a guy and was massively depressed so girls weren't really on my mind then either.

College is really when I started to feel able to shed a lot of my baggage from my childhood and teen years and start to formulate who I wanted to be for the next part of my life. Sexuality wasn't really too important to me considering some of the other things I was grappling with until I got involved with a guy. Until then I was... I guess I'll say sexually repressed? That sounds a bit extreme but I'm not sure how else to describe it. And I loved him and was into him sexually for sure. He would tease me a bit about my interest in girls, of which I was still pretty much in denial. In fairness I was playing Mass Effect when I was in the thick of it with him and if your self-described straight girlfriend suddenly develops a deep passion for a blue alien chick that'll probably start raising some flags for anyone. Things ended between us for unrelated reasons but after I moved on from it I started to more seriously question things... and then I started watching Adventure Time, and that's really when it just smacked me in the face. I make a conscious effort to include the role of media in this because I think it explains why media representation is so important to me, even if it sounds a bit silly to essentially say "Adventure Time made me queer."

Moving along to today, I'm still a bit confused and don't quite know what the deal is. Now is probably as good a time as any to state this as ever, but this past weekend I pretty much just said **** it and started considering myself bisexual. My point for the personal history being, I don't think that if 11-year-old ... read this she would be too shocked. I mean, I remember in middle school, when I first heard the word bisexual, and thought "huh, that sounds... kind of like me." Since it's taken me, and is still taking me, time to come to grips with that I don't think it would have been met with complete acceptance, of course. But the recent questioning has sort of made me look back onto my childhood and reframe my experiences within this lens, and they start to make a lot more sense.

I wrote more than I expected, thank you for joining us on another episode of whose sexuality is it anyway

 

I have a thing for symbolism, psychology, and mythology, so when you put the three together you have something that borders on an obsession of mine. It's kind of like profiling where I look at small details in a person's behavior and I'm able to find a whole bunch of things I can associate with that. I'm talking colors, animals, the classical elements, and things like that.

Essentially, I'm really interested in the matters of the soul and trying to figure out what people are like in their depths. We live in a world that's so preachy when it comes to individualism, but I feel no one's tried to grasp at it's essence.

So yeah, I put a lot of my free time into that. Didn't do that kind of stuff so much as a kid.

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Power to you , gurl.