We are taught, early and often, to name what we are.
Gay. Straight. Bisexual. Lesbian. The naming feels like arrival. Like finally having a word for a feeling that lived wordless inside you for years. And for many people, that word is a lifeboat. I don’t want to take anyone’s lifeboat away.
But I want to ask a quiet question. What if the map isn’t the whole story?
A philosopher named Korzybski said it plainly: the map is not the territory. Every map is a simplification. Useful, necessary even, but never the full truth of the land it represents. Labels are maps. They point at something real. But they leave things out.
I don’t experience attraction as a category. I experience it as a current. Something that moves between two people when there is genuine depth, genuine presence, genuine soul on both sides. I’ve stopped trying to put a name on which kind of person carries that current for me. Because honestly? The soul doesn’t have a gender.
This isn’t a manifesto against identity. People need maps. Maps get you to safety. Maps build community and political power and a sense of belonging when the world has made you feel like you don’t belong anywhere.
But I wonder what becomes possible when we hold the map a little more lightly. When we stay curious about the actual territory in front of us. When we ask not what are you but who are you.
What if the deepest connections of our lives are waiting just past the edge of the category we’ve drawn around ourselves?
The territory is wilder than the map. And so much more interesting.
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