Hi, I’m Hannah, and I’m pansexual. Quite a lot of people make jokes about how that means I am attracted to frying pans, which honestly pisses me off. How immature. I think it’s pretty rude to have someone be transparent with you about their sexuality and you to just turn around and make it into a joke. But, we are here to talk about me, and my journey to discovering that I am 100% pansexual and I don’t feel as if any other label fits me as well as this one.
My sexuality/romanticism has been something I have been questioning for a long while. I started questioning the expectation to be straight when I was about 14. I say it was an expectation, not only because it is typically what society says is normal, but it’s also what is considered normal in a strongly religious household, like mine. When I was young, I didn’t fully understand the spectrum of sexuality, since I just wasn’t taught about it. In my religious household, I was taught a woman was to lay with a man, and any relations with the same sex would be considered a sin and I would basically be damned to hell. That’s it! That is all I was taught about the wide spectrum of sexuality that humans can fall on.
The first time I ‘came out’ I told people that I was a lesbian. At this point, that was all I knew there to be. Straight and gay and nothing in between. I knew that I was sexually attracted to men as well, but I was under the impression that if I wasn’t 100% straight, I was gay. So I was a lesbian! Then this is where the ride gets wild. I was sexually assaulted by someone I was close to (we won’t get into detail) and I developed severe PTSD. I started identifying as Asexual, meaning I didn’t experience any kind of sexual attraction. At this point in my life, that was very true. I was very emotionally scarred by the traumatic experience I had and my PTSD would result in flashbacks whenever a new, consensual, sexual experience presented itself.
A couple years down the road, I have been going to therapy, I have started learning about the sexuality spectrum (THANKS INTERNET), and I started identifying as bisexual because I learned that to be the label for people who found attraction to both genders. ME! Finally a label for me, or so I thought. It wasn’t until recently that I started hearing about pansexuality and actually starting to research what that meant and what a pansexual person’s experience was like. Basically pansexual people are attracted to others regardless of gender. I like to say, “I’m attracted to people, not parts.” I had always just said oh, I am bisexual, but I’m a personality person. It wasn’t until I really found the term pansexual that I realized me being a “personality person” went so much deeper than that.
Hannah Sutton's Blog 