Developing confidence in my sexuality has been a journey we can all relate to.

When I first entered the queer community, I felt frustrated by the sense that I had just traded in one exclusive social circle for another. Emotionally, I was back in junior high, figuring out what to wear, how to talk, what identity language to use so that I would come across as a more “seasoned queer.” Being called a “baby gay” felt totally invalidating because I had been queer my whole life—I just wasn’t raised by queer people and hadn’t been introduced to queer culture.

It took me years to develop “queer confidence,” which didn’t actually look like dressing/talking like other queer people I’d met. Instead, it looked like building the conviction that however I dress, look, act, and speak is queer enough. Instead of evaluating an outfit, label, or type of sex against “how queer others will perceive it to be,” I started evaluating them based on how they felt. How my body reacted, how my breathing changed, how my heartbeat shifted. I became my own measure of “queer enough.”

So many of us wonder if we are queer enough, trans enough, dom enough, masc enough, enough of an initiator or enough of a partner. All of these are flavors of the same fear—wondering if we are, at our core, enough.