10 february 2024
This comes up for me every year in my Facebook memories, and this year I'd like to make it into a blog post that can be more widely shared.
This is a big long thing, but I think it's important, so please bear with me if you will.
As you grow up, particularly when you are a child, but throughout your life, you are a sponge. You take in experiences and kinda store them in your brain. Think of it as a database. You take in all this information, and it gets stored. The stuff that's going on around the information itself, it also gets stored. People's reactions to what you do and say and how you portray yourself, they all get attached to this information. Think of it as metadata. The stuff that happens to you, the stuff that you do, all the reactions to it, and how it makes you feel, that all gets stored in your brain and attached to that data.
You also develop a worldview. Something that works to make sense of the information that's been stored. Call that a schema. You have this schema, and every once in a while, you'll run through some of that information in your brain, and the schema helps you to make sense of it, and the information itself helps to verify that your schema is correct.
So - what's happened in my life, quite a few times, is that my schema gets changed. My view of myself, who I am, and how I interact with the world changes. That will usually prompt me to take my internal database - all the information that's stored in my brain about myself and my experiences - and check that metadata against my schema.
This is how sexuality and gender identity work in my mind. I had ideas about how those things worked when I was younger, and when I ran that schema against my internal database, it helped me make sense of the world and my place in it. Then that schema changed (quite a few times, actually) and I re-ran that database against it, and was able to make more sense of the world. It also means that every time I re-run through that set of information, I reevaluate the metadata that's been set on it. Particularly the sets of metadata around attraction, identity, and self. Sometimes that reevaluation means that I set new and different metadata around those events based on my new understandings of myself and the world around me.
The point being, it's all right. It's okay to be a different person than you were five, ten, fifteen years ago - hopefully life is full of learning and changing. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about coming to new understandings of previous information about yourself based in the light of a new schema and understanding of who you are and what you are about.