We live in a world that isn’t always kind to ambiguity, especially when it comes to sexual orientation. As an author Katie Heaney wrote in his 2018 memoir, Would you rather: “People want a clear narrative arc. Especially me. We want gay adults to have gay childhoods—the elementary school crushes, the closeted adolescence, the gradual understanding. We want a line, without interruption, without deviation, from Point A to Point B. But we’ve broken and swerved enough.”

Heaney’s statement resonates deeply with me, a person who has broken, swerved, and exited no fewer than five times in my life (as bisexuals! As a strange generic! Like a lesbian! Like her/them! Again as bisexual!). I am grateful for the people in my life who made room for it all my various identities and they didn’t question or judge me as I switched between them – but unfortunately that’s not necessarily the norm as a singer Shawn Mendes proved on Monday. At a concert in Colorado, US, he opened up to fans about his sexuality, saying: “Ever since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality and people have been talking about it for so long. The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I figure it out like everybody else. I don’t really know sometimes and I do other times. And it’s very scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that.”

Unfortunately, Mendes isn’t the only celebrity who’s felt the pressure to define her sexuality for the public lately. When Billie Eilish came out as queer in 2023, she was not thrilled with the fervor that surrounded her announcement, later recounting Vogue: “I would like no one to know anything about my sexuality or my dating life. Always, always, always.” Should you really be honest with the world about who you are and who you love automatically giving everyone the right to every detail about who you date or how you identify?

More than 7% of Americans now identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, but there isn’t much reliable data on how many of these people are — or have been — questioning their sexuality. Anecdotally, I can unequivocally state that almost every queer, trans, and nonbinary person I know has, at some point, experienced a lack of clarity about their sexuality and/or gender. Is it because they are just confused, like TERFs would you like to believe, or because sexuality and gender are two of the most porous and multifaceted aspects of life? It’s hard to feel 100% secure in any part of your identity any of time, especially when communities face a increasing homophobia and transphobia and many of the societal messages you regularly receive still he wants you to be straight and cis.

There can be immense joy in claiming a label for yourself, whether you subscribe to the born-this-way careerism philosophy or, like me, you’ve called yourself a variety of different things over the years, all of which feel right at the time. yet neither is necessarily capable of distilling the essence of your sexuality into a word or two. There could be room for infinitely more joy in the LGBTQ+ community, however, if we stopped forcing each other (and, yes, highly visible pop culture figures like Mendes and Eilish) to define ourselves in an immediate and lasting way, and , instead, we would make room. for the deeply relatable, inherently beautiful process of, as Mendes puts it, “figuring it out.”