Hello everyone!

Hey!

My name is Luise (which, for reasons unknown to me, is apparently not an acceptable username, even though it is supposedly not taken yet?:lol and I'm in the process of coming out, which, so far, is mostly... meh. Yeah. 'Meh' probably is a very apt description. It's basically like going to the dentist for a routine checkup: nothing extremely unpleasant is happening, but the whole experience isn't exactly fun either and all those scary drills and other instruments aren't that far away.

I am female and bisexual (with a preference for women, I'd say).
I have already come out to a very close friend, which went well- of course I was terribly nervous, but his reaction was to simply raise his eyebrows and tell me: 'Luise, it is pretty obvious that you have a huge crush on Emma Watson. You have forced me to watch the Harry Potter movies an unhealthy amount of times'. Success! (!)
My attempt at coming out to my parents today went considerably less well- I got the classic 'It's just a phase'-phrase in all its variations. But yeah, let's focus on the positive: Their reaction, whilst certainly neither enthusiastic nor positive, wasn't negative either. I wasn't disowned, I still have a roof over my head, in summary, I am lucky and have it better than some other queer folks out there. Count your blessings, basically.
I'm not quite sure how far I want to take this whole coming-out-thing. I still want to come out to a few close friends and maybe, maybe some other relatives, but I don't really feel the urge to let the whole world know right now. Certain parts of my family are extremely conservative, and whilst the part of me that just applied for studying law really wants to come out to those people in particular- imagine all the fun arguments!- I also see that it wouldn't really improve anyone's situation.
I'm also almost done with school- just a few months left- and I'll leave my hometown to go to university in London, most likely. I don't think there's a point for me in coming out to people I don't know all that well if I'm going to move away in a few months and might never see them again, which is why I probably won't come out to casual acquaintances or anything like that. At least I think so right now. And London is London, it's basically the queer capital of England. I don't think coming out will be as much of a problem there as in my tiny little hometown somewhere in the misty English marshlands, where 'being gay' is otherwise known as 'that morally wrong thing people in big cities do that would never happen in our beautiful idyllic little village'. :lol:
The main goal for now is to get my parents to wrap their heads around the concept of 'our daughter generally likes women, but she isn't totally adverse to the concept of men either'. The whole idea of liking more than one gender (even if, as in my case, to varying degrees) was virtually unknown to my parents before today, and I think it's quite confusing for them. It would be easier if I was just gay, plain and simple, but there would be no point in telling them I was gay and then having to explain a boyfriend...

So yeah, here I am. I have embarked onto the longest routine dental checkup of my life, to stick with the awful metaphor from earlier. It's not fun, but it's not bad either. Part of me is happy that so far, nothing bad happened, another part of me is sad that my parents didn't react more positively, but I guess you can't have everything. I hope they'll come around.

Thanks for reading! I hope to get some support here, or (because once I invented a bad metaphor, I might just as well stick with it) hold my hand if the dentist takes out the drill and things get unpleasant.
Love,
Luise