Replaying your whole history for the moment that proves it
A crush at fourteen. A dream. Something you once found funny. Reviewing your past for evidence of who you are is a compulsion, and it cannot succeed, because the past was not a test either.
You have gone back through all of it. The friendship at school that was very intense. The dream you had once and remembered. The film you liked more than you expected. The time you looked at someone for a second longer than made sense. Each one gets examined for what it proves, and each one, examined, proves something, and the something is never enough to close the case, so you go back and examine the next one.
Reviewing your history is one of the central compulsions in this theme, and I want to explain why it cannot succeed, because the failure is not for lack of thoroughness.
The past was not a test either
The review assumes that somewhere in your history there is a moment that settles the question. But your history was not a series of tests. It was a life, full of the ordinary ambiguity that every life contains: intense friendships, dreams that meant nothing, moments of noticing people, things found funny or attractive or strange. Everybody has these. They are what being a person looks like.
The review takes each of these ordinary things and asks it to testify. And because the review is being conducted under fear, looking for a specific answer, the ambiguity resolves in the direction of the fear. The intense friendship, the dream and the moment of looking all become evidence. None of it was evidence when it happened. It has been made into evidence by the way it is being examined.
Memory under inspection
There is a second problem. Memory is reconstructive. Every time you recall an event, you rebuild it and store the rebuilt version over the original. Recall the school friendship a hundred times, each time asking what it really meant, and the memory you end up with is not the friendship. It is a version rewritten a hundred times by the question, and it will have drifted towards whatever the question was looking for. Rehearsed possibilities acquire the texture of memories. The past you are reviewing is, by now, partly manufactured by the review.
The lists
Alongside the memory review there is usually the research: reading, at length, what the signs are supposed to be. And every list fits you and does not fit you at the same time, because the lists are written broadly and read personally, and because the question you are bringing to them is not answerable by a list. The research feels like diligence. It functions as reassurance-seeking, and it leaves you with more to check than you started with.
Every direction incriminating
Finding a memory that seems to prove it is evidence. Finding no such memory proves you have suppressed it. Remembering ordinary attraction to your current orientation proves nothing, because it could have been performance. There is no result the review can return that counts as innocent. That is the signature of an OCD compulsion, and it is why you have been playing for years without winning a round.
What it is actually about
There is nothing wrong with any of the answers, which is exactly why the treatment is not aimed at finding one. This theme is the inability to close a question, and the review is one of the ways the question is kept open. Straight people run this review about being gay. Gay people run it about being straight. The symmetry shows that the content is beside the point.
Stopping the review
In CBT with exposure and response prevention, the mental review is withdrawn like any other compulsion: gradually, by agreement, and with the practice of letting the memory arrive and not examining it. The intense friendship comes to mind, and you let it be what it was, a friendship, and go back to your day. The doubt rises, and then, given nothing to feed on, it falls. Inference-based CBT is also a strong fit here, because almost all of the evidence is a chain of reasoning about what a moment might have meant, stacked on top of a life that was never a test.
I have no view about what your orientation should turn out to be, and I will not be assessing it while you talk. If you have been searching your past for years, there is more on how I treat sexual orientation OCD, and the searching is one of the first things we stop.