Story Card for LGBT+

I recently wrote the following as a quick synopsis of my experience as an LGBT person for an educational talk we give in the dorms on campus. It was so difficult to put everything into such a small package that I figured I'd repost it here... I'm proud of it :)

I was born female and raised with the assumption that I'd be a feminine woman and marry a man. I was never really a tomboy, but I was adamant that I was “not a girly-girl.” Nothing about being LGBT was familiar to me until I was 16, when I did some research and finally owned up that the love I'd had for girls was something beyond deep friendship. I'd had a crush on a boy before, so I came out as bi, and even had a relationship with a guy. But the older I got, the more I found that my attractions were extremely skewed toward women, and started identifying as lesbian. Something about that felt lacking, too, though, so I eventually settled for the label “queer,” which I feel communicates that I'm outside the heteronormative standard without constricting me to a definition. I kept finding more and more that my queerness applied itself to things other than just attraction, and that I didn't have to keep cramming myself into gender boxes if it would grant me peace not to. Now I'm slowly coming out as genderqueer: neither man nor woman. I can't be out to most people because it confuses them too much, but it's been so freeing and I make so much more sense to myself that I know this fits. I fully expect that things will continue to shift over time, but that doesn't bother me; I love being queer.