I Mistook Heterosexuality for Safety and Being Easily Understood

I waited from the time I took my first breath to be really seen, heard, known, and loved.

That’s all I ever wanted.

To be known, to me, was to be loved. And to be loved was to be safe and seen.

And for most of my life, I mistook heterosexuality (and everything that came with its assumed legibility) for safety: something that would make me more easily understood and less exposed to being perceived.

It meant building a version of myself that could pass as “sexually typical”, even when something about me was clearly registering as different. A default track I could contain myself within. One area of life I could silo as “normal “ while everything else in me stayed unnamed, simmering, and too complex to hold all at once.

Heterosexuality functioned like that for a long time. Not as a deep truth, but as a socially legible structure I thought would reduce complexity. Something I could organize part of myself around to check a box, without ever fully interrogating what I actually felt.

And underneath that was a quieter logic I didn’t yet have language for: if I could be easily understood, maybe I could be safe and less exposed to the experience of being perceived.

I was also living with undiagnosed neurodivergence—Autism, ADHD, OCD, and PDA—and much of it was never something I could successfully hide. I was honest to a neurotypical fault. I didn’t take to niceties. I pushed back against anything that felt unjust. I had obsessive anxieties, a deeply dysregulated nervous system, and a hair-trigger sense for control, coercion, and hypocrisy. I was easily combative and furiously railing against systems that seemed to care far more about compliance than understanding, let alone safety.

I was already overloaded in other ways too: moving through a family system and wider community that had only the faintest crumbs of support. And as the eldest daughter of three kids—including a younger sibling with externalized PDA, AuDHD, OCD, and an intellectual disability that, at the time, was wrongly labeled “mildly retarded”—my own internal experience often disappeared entirely inside the family ecosystem.

Not that support was particularly supportive anyway.

These were the 90s. Neurodivergent “support” was often little more than tightly-woven assimilation into what was considered acceptable functioning, or filtered through systems that centered cis-het, upper-middle-class, white, male-coded depictions of Autism: either savant brilliance or pitiable disability. There was very little room for the actual texture of difference to exist without being translated by force into something more socially acceptable, more containable, more easily understood—and easier to control.

I was the “black sheep” in a system that didn’t have the framework to name why I was different, just that I was a “difficult” “angry” “bitch”. I was already managing perception constantly. Already trying to tanslate myself into something others could even tolerate. There was very little room left for anything else. Very little capacity left for exploration and very little safety for ambiguity.

And part of what looked, from the outside, like being “boy-crazy” was actually something else entirely: people were my special interest.

I was deeply fascinated by them: their emotional patterns, their behaviors, their contradictions, their humanness. I could hyperfocus into whatever crush-of-the-week, but internally this was sustained attention, analysis, and immersion. I would move from one person to another with intense focus, learning them, attempting to understand them, often through admiration more than desire.

From the outside it looked like romantic fixation. But I didn’t have language for what was actually happening: neurodivergent special interest, social pattern mapping, and emotional mirroring as a way of orienting myself in a world I didn’t fully understand.

And because it needed to feel safe, I often chose people who were unreachable. Guys that would never look my way. Older boys and college-aged men that danced on the line of what’s an appropriate interaction with a 13 year old. or a 15 year old. or a 17 year old. And as a young person addicted to the ritual of daily TRL, celebrity crushes were especially useful.

Freddie Prinze Jr., whose face I had collaged over every inch of my bedroom door as a teenager and whose movies I would watch on repeat, feeling his characters’ emotional intensity, morality and humanness. Lance Bass (the irony of him also masking heterosexuality as a closeted gay man in *NSYNC is not lost on me). It wasn’t performative, it was immersive. Regulating. Contained. A safe way to study attachment without risk. And most importantly: a way to pass. check a box. have an answer for the question “who is your crush?!” to deflect from all the other questions I most certainly didn’t have answers to.

It was a perfect storm of masking, hyperfocus, cultural mirroring, and special-interest attachment that helped me get through adolescence without a framework for any of it.

I didn’t yet have language for it, but even the way I experienced attraction wasn’t separate from how I learned to survive attention itself.

Sexuality didn’t get to be something I explored slowly or safely or curiously. It had to exist in the margins of everything else I was already trying to hold together. And, being a 13 year old child with a grown woman’s figure did not help quiet any of the attention I never asked for, but was getting in uncomfortable droves from strangers constantly.

I love this Tina Fey quote that so accurately described mine (and so many other female-presenting humans' experience):

“Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ...It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working.”

Because queerness, for me, was never just about attraction; it was about visibility in a body that had learned visibility wasn’t neutral.

I didn’t want to be perceived in a way that exceeded what I could control or translate.

I also waited, in a very real way, to be known from the beginning of my life. To be seen clearly without having to translate myself first. When that doesn’t happen early, you learn to build yourself around being legible instead of being known.

So I stayed in a middle space: wanting intimacy, but resisting exposure. wanting love, but managing perception first. wanting connection, but fearing what it would cost to be known.

Even attraction itself became tangled with survival logic.

At times, I learned I could influence how I was perceived; if I could understand what men wanted, anticipate desire, and stay within it, then maybe I could reduce dismissal and harm. Not as control, but as a nervous system trying to create predictability inside something that never felt safe.

If attention was already going to exist, maybe I could steer it away from danger and toward something more manageable. It wasn’t empowerment. It was adaptation. And it came from a place where uncertainty didn’t feel neutral, it felt physically unsafe.

The male gaze, at times, functioned similarly. Not as desire, but as containment. If I was desired, maybe I was less rejectable as a human. If I was wanted, maybe I could negotiate for kindness, softness, respect, or boundaries. Not because the logic held, but because it felt like one of the only available systems of agency.

But there’s a quiet fracture in that strategy: being desired is not the same as being known. And I didn’t have that distinction yet.

There’s also a memory from my teens that still sits with me.

I was (looking back) mid-meltdown, overwhelmed in a way I didn’t yet have language for, and my mother—trying to make sense of why I wasn’t like other kids—asked me exhasperatedly if I was gay.

It should have been a moment of clarity.

But I didn’t yet have language for myself, so I could only respond with an emphatic no.

Not because it was fully true, but because I didn’t know what else I was being asked.

And still, I kept finding myself most at ease around queer people long before I could explain why. In culinary school especially, I thrived among them. I felt less guarded, less performative, less like I was constantly translating myself. I read it as shared outsiderhood. I didn’t yet understand it as recognition.

Safety itself was information I didn’t yet know how to interpret.

Still, I didn’t come out.

Because I didn’t have language. I didn’t have safety. I didn’t have capacity to add another axis of visibility to a life already built around managing perception.

So I stayed masked. Got married to a cishet man. Got a Dog. Got another dog. Had a kid. Had a second kid.

And days after having my second child, something cracked open in me in a way I could no longer contain through performance alone. Sleepless and exhausted, I had a fever dream where my newborn son was his older self, came out to me, and I responded with immediate love and acceptance.

He looked at me suspiciously and as clear as day he asked: how can you say that when you’re not doing it yourself? You’re not living honestly. I woke up in a cold sweat and couldn’t un-know it. I couldn’t live in integrity if I wasn’t living honestly.

I breathlessly told my husband with said child in my arms. I was terrified, but he wasn’t surprised. He had already heard me circling my queerness for years: the way I described attraction, the way I never quite landed in the categories I was supposed to fit. He (an also at that time undiagnosed AuDHDer with OCD + PDA) had already done the pattern recognition I was still learning to name. It wasn’t new information to him. It was something he had already known and loved about me.

The same was true for many friends when I came out. A quiet recognition. A yeah, that makes sense. Only my family system expressed surprise, because the version of me they had constructed didn’t include this piece, even though it had always been there.

And something in that response clarified what I had always sensed: sometimes what we think we are hiding is already visible in how we move through the world.

Coming out wasn’t transformation. It was pressure release.

Then, during the solitude of Covid, I realized I was non-binary, and it felt less like becoming someone new and more like returning home to myself. Not creating an identity, but finally allowing something already true to exist without distortion.

Looking back, I don’t think I was ever absent from myself.

I think I was overloaded.

Over-perceived. Over-adapted. Over-masked. Trying to survive socially, neurologically, and emotionally all at once while cramming myself into the smallest possible version of who I could be.

And still, I wasn’t done uncovering myself.

Three years ago, after both of my children were diagnosed, I received another kind of birth announcement: me.

Not metaphorically. Not “a little neurodivergent.” Autistic. ADHD. OCD. PDA.

Getting diagnosed at 37 cracked my world open and answered the question my heart had been quietly asking with every beat: who am I?

And maybe the most surprising part was this: I had been there the whole time. I just finally existed in a world with enough language and understanding for me to recognize myself more clearly.

There is something important I understand now: research and lived experience increasingly show a strong overlap between neurodivergence and queer and gender-expansive identities, particularly among autistic and ADHD individuals. Not because neurodivergence determines identity, but because differences in perception, pattern recognition, and social learning can mean dominant frameworks are not automatically assumed—and instead must be consciously, sometimes belatedly, constructed from internal truth under conditions that are not always safe.

And when you’re doing that without real neuroaffirming support—only fragments of possible understanding offered by the adults and systems around you—it takes much longer to even have the language to ask the right questions.

I didn’t lack identity.

I lacked safety, language, and enough internal space to recognize my full self while I was still trying so hard to survive being perceived.

Now, rounding out my year of 40, I finally feel more rooted in myself than in the performance of being understandable to everyone else.

An AuDHD PDA-er with OCD.
A nonbinary pansexual human.

Someone still searching for love, safety, and authentic connection—but with far less willingness to abandon myself in exchange for legibility.

Not through performance.
Not through shrinking into something easier to translate.
Not through trying to earn safety by becoming more understandable.

But through finally allowing myself to exist with less editing.

It turns out I was never hiding from myself as much as I was trying to survive being misunderstood.

I spent so much of my life trying to become understandable that I almost missed the person underneath all the translation.