#I thought I was asexual until I graduated high school and well I did relate to it! I didnt experience that stuff until I was older and

[mooncruiser]

Heyy!! I’ve been meaning to pin my testimony, so here it is :)

So, my life wasn’t really the greatest growing up. I mention C-PTSD in my bio, and that’s what I’ll get into a bit. I’ll try not to be too graphic, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be totally safe.

There were some questionable things in my toddler years, a neglectful daycare center for 3 months, my dad being in and out of my life due to fear of getting attached at first, him flying off the handle once with me (my mom got on him for it, so it never happened again) but I think the trauma started with my cousins leaving me stuck out in a baby swing twice, a near death experience with a dog bite, and a homicidal attempt on me and my mom by my sister, who was 16 at the time (I’m 5 years old). 

There was also the dog cage incident I believe at…6 years old? Me and my brother were playing and he forgot me on accident. I pretty much accepted at this point that life was gonna chain me up and try to kill me lol, but it let up for a good while, and I had a pretty decent childhood. At 9 years old, there was the torturously loud school program in the gym I had to sit through for 2 hours, I think. 

It was at 10 when things became chronically ongoing. Domestic violence at home from my sister (physical, emotional abuse on me and my family), more physical and emotional abuse at school from my assistant teacher because I was on an IEP for my autism. At 11, I was sexually abused by my female friend who was 12, and her female cousin, who was 13. I was abandoned by my cousins and aunt, and I was being placed in a seclusion room at school during standardized tests (which was sensory deprived solitary confinement) even after I was finished for the day. At 12 years old, I started being emotionally neglected by my mother.

I mean, I was so angry and depressed and secretly suicidal at 10, but by 12 I was severely dissociating (I had been dissociating during trauma at various times prior). I had so much fear and anxiety that by the time I was 13 I’d be feeling like passing out 24/7, so I got on meds, which only helped the more severe physical symptoms, I guess. 

At 13, I started being groomed by this high school girl that liked me. She was a Sophomore, and I was in 7th grade. She noticed the neglect and told me she knew me better. She would give me gifts, teach me to ship gay pairings, gave me a gay pedophilic manga. Shamelessly told me she had sexual relations with her male cousin and his friends who were around my age. I blocked it out. 

I also had a very abusive friendship with a girl online who had BPD. My assistant teacher, who came with me to middle school, restrained and tortured me with the marching band’s loud music in the hallway, which only intensified my dissociative symptoms (I was actually switching alters at this point regularly and having no idea).

I remember at 13 being confused about my gender and sexuality. My mom was no help and just wanted me to hide it from my family and everyone else, for reputation purposes and she didn’t want me bullied. That was actually how I decided to get in contact with my grooming abuser, which I wonder at this point whether that was my fault. I didn’t expect her to really take over like she did, but I was essentially brainwashed into accepting whatever I was feeling for her benefit. I just wanted advice and a friend. 

I was so lonely, I had been desperate for friends for years, and I was desperate for someone to love me in any way, honestly. I was overeating. I’d spend hours daydreaming, in video games or entertainment to escape from school and everything else. During meltdowns, I’d be doing self injurious behaviors. 

So by 14, I come out as a lesbian. Had a couple relationships with girls who just saw me as a sexual object (I remember saying yes to sexual things even though I didn’t want to, just so that they wouldn’t abandon me. Dissociating off and finding it disgusting), would cheat on me with multiple people, ignore me for new friends, etc. 

The BPD friend I dated, when I broke up with her, immediately attempted suicide so that scarred me more into our trauma bond. She’d show me self harm pics she took from time to time. It scared me into making sure I didn’t trigger her again, but u know I never knew what triggered her in the first place, so, like with everything else, I had no strategy to life. It was either fight, run, dissociate or nod yes to everything. She took up the latter lol. 

I came out as trans my Freshman year, and stayed that way into my Sophomore year. I was bitter about dating because of the whole sexual object thing, and full of shame at the same time, thinking no one would want me. I thought I was asexual. I tried out a career high school honestly just to get away from the memories of my old school. 

Some feelings about being trans started to fade, but not entirely, so I went by genderfluid/genderqueer from 17-19. I was excited to make new friends at my new school, but my anxiety kept me from it. I opened up very awkwardly about my dating history to one girl (which tbh I shouldn’t have, but I had been brainwashed so lol) and she told all the girls in my lab, and I was excluded and bullied (and cyberbullied) from thereon. 

I didn’t know it at first, it was so subtle. But once I knew, I tried standing up for myself and told the principal, which made them leave me alone for the most part. They’d glare at me, use me at graduation, cyberbully me one last time 8 months after graduation, and that was it. I still had to deal with domestic violence until I was 22, but once I graduated everything pretty much hit me.

I knew I’d be too stressed out to go to college or work. School indoctrination tried to teach me to be neurotypical and expect this, but it wasn’t happening. I was too afraid to leave my house for a year, and too afraid to be honest online for fear of being watched and bullied, or stalked. I was seriously considering suicide down the line. I thought I had nothing left to live for. I was useless. Nobody cared. Friends moved on to their new lives and I was dying. 

That’s when Jesus stepped in.

I guess I started being curious about God again for the first time since I was 12. I always believed in God, was grateful to Him for being there for me during the domestic violence and never blamed Him for it. I found out about worship music and was thrilled, and a question came up. Was being gay a sin? My grooming abuser taught me that God made me gay, so it was alright. But I wanted to know for sure this time from the Word. 

To my surprise, she was wrong. The Bible said it was indeed, a sin (the practice, not so much the identity aspect). I couldn’t piece together why, so I struggled with it for months. On my 20th birthday however, when I got done creating fanart of a gay pairing, I felt strongly convicted by the Holy Spirit that it was wrong. So I went to God.

I said, “If it is wrong, please change me so I can make You happy, because I love You. In the meantime, I won’t do anything in support of it for a while. If it’s not wrong, don’t change me, and I’ll know which way is right because I trust You.” When I look back on it, it was a pretty crazy prayer. Lots of people have said they couldn’t “pray the gay away”, and I do wonder what the difference was with me.

After 3 months, I stopped to check if I still felt anything, and the feelings were gone. My gender dysphoria was gone, too. I was way too afraid to tell anybody yet, but I remember when I did, one of the first people I told was my grooming abuser. 

She was livid, tried one last time to intimidate me. Another time we crossed paths (she came out of nowhere saying hi, said she worked at that market, complimented me and walked away smiling) and I was triggered, I messaged her and told her how she hurt me and I couldn’t bear to be around her anymore, but I hoped she’d have a good life. She didn’t respond online, but she complained to my sister that I thought she was a predator, and by the end of the conversation tries to get her to tell me she said hi. When she had kids, she was planning on raising them to be nonbinary. Her husband was abusive to them, so she ended up losing them. She never bugged me again. 

I was blown away by how God had changed me. How He opened my eyes to the truth. I prayed for Him to open my eyes to whatever else I had been blind to, and He slowly began lifting off the amnesia surrounding all my traumas, urging me towards recovery with Him. I realized I might have OSDD-1b recently as well, which is strange that I could have possibly had DID prior to losing my amnesia? 

I have been on this journey ever since, journaling, blogging, researching, and finally in a wonderful therapy called EMDR where I truly release the traumas from my body, hear God’s new positive beliefs to replace old negative ones from my childhood, and experience loving extraordinary visions while processing that teach me to focus on Jesus, trust Him more, love and pray for my enemies, and have a real satisfying relationship with Him that’s unattainable with anyone on Earth, along with daily Bible study. 

The picture on the left was me at 16 in my old life, the one on the right is me in my new creation :) God bless all of you, thank you for reading this far 💕💖

[thedepressionoftrees]

I'm going to go on a half rant half... Idk what to call it, I guess just speaking into the air.

This is going to be about growing up in the closet in the middle of a city full of people who would hate you if they new the truth.

I started to realize that I was different from other kids when I was around 8. That was the age when societal gender roles started to be assigned to kids. Before then I could have worn anything I wanted, played with anything I wanted without judgement. At around 8 years old, adults started telling me that blue was for boys, pink was for girls. That I couldn't wear that skirt because only girls wear skirts. And some days that was fine, but other days it felt like I was seriously missing out on something.

If the adults were bad, the kids were worse. I remember that my only friends were the other social outcasts. My best and only friend until grade three was a girl with terminal brain cancer. I remember sobbing at her funeral, sad that she was gone, but also sad that I would be alone.

I was bullied all through school. The teachers did nothing to stop it. They thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't fit into their cookie-cutter mold of what a child should be like.

I never had a name for what to call myself until at around age 12 I read the second book in the Magnus Chase series. There I read about someone I could relate to. Someone who was like me. It was there that I learned the term genderfluid. Alex Fierro was a character that changed my life, and I will always be eternally grateful to Rick Riordan for including them.

Now that I had a term that I knew about, I could do covert research. I learned about the lgbtq+ community. I learned about terminology, pronouns, and how to transition.

I couldn't tell my parents about any of this. They were strict christians who would never accept me for who I really was. I kept quiet.

Fast forward to my senior year in high school. I am now 18 years old and puberty his hitting me hard. I got my first strong taste of gender dysphoria then. I slept constantly. I would either sleep or cry throughout all of school. Nobody offered help. Nobody wanted to see if I was doing alright. They couldn't comfort the outcast without becoming outcasts themselves, so the left me be.

It was also this year that I learned about my sexuality. I had (somehow) gotten myself a girlfriend. She was happy, I was not. Prom came around. We were both 18 and it was going to be a special night. It was when she was getting undressed that I had my sexual awaking. HOLY SHIT I WAS ASEXUAL, HOW AM I GOING TO EXPLAIN THIS?! After quite a bit of awkward talking, about how I didn't think I was ready to take this step, and it wasn't her it was me, we stopped that course of action. I think she started picking up on my inner asexual because a week later, we broke up.

Holy crap I'm getting distracted and this is just becoming an autobiography, but oh well, might as well throw my life story on the internet, I don't think anyone could use it against me in any way. Oh well, back to my life.

I have now graduated from high school, and I've started to outgrow the closet. Everytime my parents misgender me, it feels like a punch to the gut. I start realizing that I need to start coming out to people.

I start with the person I knew would be okay with it, my adopted sister. She was no longer living in the same house as me, and if she took it badly, there wasn't much she could do. To my delight, she took it great. She is still one of my biggest supporters and I love her a ton.

Next came my little sister. She was still living with us, but I knew she was okay with LGBT stuff. That went similarly well.

I did the same with my older sister, and that went just as well.

Next comes my biggest mistake. Feeling emboldened by the successes, I decided to come out to my older brother. At first he seemed supportive. Then about a couple of hours later he texted me. He told me that he had prayed about it, and he had received an answer. Trigger warning ahead, transphobia, homophobia, if that's a bad thing for you, please skip to the next paragraph. He called me an abomination in the eyes of god. He told me that God hated "the queers" and that I needed to repent.

He then told me that he was going to tell my parents. I begged with him to give me a week to prepare anything I needed in case I got kicked out. He agreed to give me a week. A day and a half later, he outed me.

I remember a lot of screaming from my parents. My mom was crying, my dad was yelling. They didn't kick me out of the house, luckily, but they then went on a crusade to make my life hell.

The first thing they did was call a priest to come "exorcise the demon causing my gayness". After that didn't work, they tried to send me to gay conversion therapy. My therapist, bless her, talked them out of it. They still proceeded to constantly misgender me, do "contraband searches", and try to make my life hell.

Well, it's been about 6 months since then. Life has gotten slightly better. But it's still hard.

Idk what the point of writing all this was. It just felt good to talk about. Congrats if you made it all the way

[secret-ssociety]

Soulmate

Pairing: college!Peter Parker x Reader Warnings: Harassment, cursing, a little angst, a liiiittle violence, fluff Summary: Girl meets boy. Girl goes on a date with boy. Girl tells boy to be just friends at the end of the date. Boy spreads rumors about girl. Girl gets harassed in campus. Girl has a conversation with best friend about dating and soulmates. Fluff follows. A/N: not like a trigger warning but there is a some God-related talk in the following lines and if that makes you uncomfortable don’t bother reading because I don’t want complaints

Masterlist

When Peter graduated high school he made a vow to himself to no more silent crushes. His days of stealing glances and staring in awe from across the hall were over. Of course he hadn’t met you yet.

Right into his first day in his dorm, his roommates had started ranting about a girl, a freshman like himself, that was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. She came from California, they only knew that much about her, even her name was a mystery.

The next day, at his first class, he saw you enter to his same class room and instantly knew you were her. He didn’t even need you to introduce yourself, you were exactly what everyone had described and he immediately understood why everyone was head over heels for you.

You were shyly looking for a place to seat before the class started and Peter didn’t know what had taken over himself when he pointed to the sit next to him and said “this seat is empty” but you looked at him with the most beautiful smile he had ever seen and he didn’t regretted it.

One could say things moved on pretty fast from that moment on between the two of you, you gave him your number at the end of the class and had lunch together the next day, started studying together which led to you meeting his roommates (and befriending them easily now that you were more comfortable in college) and basically spending any free moment together. He even adjusted Spider-Man’s schedule to be able to hang out with you. 

In no time, you were best friends and he knew from good source (Aunt May) that college friendships were known to be more lasting, which would’ve been great if a friendship was all he wanted with you. To say that he liked you was an understatement, he loved you, he wanted to marry you and be the father of your children. Not that he was going to say anything any time soon, though.

You were at the beginning of fifth semester and he still hadn’t said anything.

Silent crush.

But now it was march and the new year was just picking up. That particular day was sunny, the air smelled like spring, classes had ended early and it was the easiest part of the semester anyway. Everything was great, right?

Wrong.

Because you were at a date with some frat douche at that very moment. Therefore Peter was laying face down on his bed, windows closed, lights shut and not making the slightest human interaction. His roommates had been trying to get him out of bed for the past hour and, seeing that none of their efforts paid off, they decided a more intense approach was needed.

They turned him around violently, two grabbed his legs, one grabbed his arms and he was dragged (thrown) to the shower under the threat that they wouldn’t let him get out of the bathroom until he got his shit together. By that moment, he already knew his friends pretty well and he knew they were absolutely capable of starving him and using the bathroom of a gas station if they had to, so cooperating was his best option.

Once he was clean and dressed, he was dragged to a party he didn’t even know was happening. None of his friends left his side, which he deep down appreciated, and tried vigorously to cheer him up, trying to tell him that you were not the only girl out there and pointing at many others present at the party. But none of them were his Y/N.

It was probably eleven o’clock when he was able to go back to the apartment he shared with his three friends. He threw the keys over the coffee table and made his way towards his room, where he plopped on his bed sticking his face between his hands.

A slight knock on his window startled him and when he turned around he saw you standing on the fire exit with half a smile, he quickly opened the window and greeted you, instantly noticing that you weren’t as happy and cheerful as you usually were.

“How was your date?” he risked to ask, feeling his heart clench, you just shrugged sitting on his bed, your back turned to him “not that great, I don’t think there will be another one” you answered playing with your fingers. Don’t smile don’t smile don’t smile he thought. You had picked your hair in a ponytail and were wearing a short pink dress, you were looking so cute it almost hurt. 

He opened his mouth to ask but you talked first “I really don’t want to talk about it. I came here as soon as he dropped me off, I hope you don’t mind” he quickly shook his head no and you sighed, facing him for the first time “can I stay over? The girls will want to interrogate me and I don’t feel like it,” Peter nodded with a sweet smile caressing your cheek.

A small smile cracked in your lips, just to fade when you turned around to take off your shoes and free your hair from the hair tie, you had already wiped your make up off with some baby wipes you kept at your purse so you just proceeded to lay on the bed, your head finding your rightful place in Peter’s chest.

“Were you drinking? You smell like rum” you said after a few seconds and felt his chest vibrate as he chuckled.

“Well, I had to do something while you ditched me” he joked, feeling your smile before falling sleep.

Peter caressed your hair absently, making you crack a small smile in your sleep. You had already slept together, no big deal, specially at finals each semester where you took any moment you could and napped together, but his heart still fluttered when you cuddled against him. It was beating so fast, he couldn’t understand how it hadn’t woken you up.

He knew very little about your date, he only knew he was an economics major, his name was Michael and how did he land a spot at the MIT remained a mystery. If he had landed a spot in the University of Arizona, it would remain a mystery. How he graduated high school remained a mystery.

... okay, maybe he didn’t know that much.

But he hated that guy’s guts for the only reason of having the courage to ask you on a date and the luck to have you say yes. When you told him, he couldn’t believe it. In your three years of college you had never went on a date and not for lack of suitors. Eventually your singleness prompted dozens of myths among freshmen.

You were a lesbian. You were asexual. You were a virgin with vaginismus. You were an alien and whoever attempted to get you laid would see the tentacles you tried so hard to hide. You were part of a cult that forbid you from fancying anyone. You were part of a cult that encouraged you to fancy people and lure them into a cave where you had to sacrifice them to pagan gods, but you didn’t since your affiliation to said cult came only from your parents being founders of it so it was easier to not see anyone.

Freshmen’s creativity could be terrifying.

But somehow this asshole, with nothing that made him somehow more special than any of the dozens of idiots that had asked you out before, had landed a date.

Lucky for Peter, you didn’t want to got on a second date with the lucky bastard and now he could go right back into silently planning the rest of your lives together in peace. Or so he thought.

It was about two in the morning when you slowly started to get up form the bed, trying not to wake Peter up. “Where’re you going?” you heard his sleepy voice when you were slowly opening the door, you turned “I have a two hour lecture in half an hour” you replied vaguely, your cold tone almost hurt but Peter understood that you weren’t in a good mode, “why?” was all he could manage to say.

You smiled fondly looking at Peter’s sleepy and confused self, you walked over him and laid him down gently, running your fingers through his hair “I arrived to inscription late” you explained making Peter laugh “idiot” he mumbled and you rolled your eyes “good night, loser.”

You were at the door when, again, his voice stopped you, “you sure you’re okay?” he asked shyly and you smiled at him “yeah, I mean it’s over.”

Little did you know it was still far from over.

Apparently Michael didn’t like being rejected and within twelve hours he managed to have the whole campus talking about how you were ungrateful, a tease and a prude, among other things. Turn the other cheek you kept telling to yourself, but it continued getting harder and harder.

Guys walked next to you with a mocking smirk, subtly mumbling something about you being a bitch that thought she was better than them and leading poor Michael on when finding out he had a massive crush on you. Girls gave you the side eye while, not so subtly, calling you a slutty prude —if that makes any sense— and how Michael was so handsome they would have “finished what you started.”

Now, Peter had never been one to start a fight, he was rather pacific, but when a group of you date’s classmates whispered the words “fucking tease” when passing you through the hall, he snapped. His sight blurred and suddenly everything he could see was red. He had been hearing comments about you all the fucking day and just couldn’t take him anymore.

He wasn’t very tall or overly muscly, but he pushed that guy with an unreasonable amount of strength. Everyone stood there in absolute shock, even the guy, who was obviously a jock, but as soon as Peter took another step towards him you grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to his apartment before he caused more of a scene.

“What the fuck is wrong with everyone today?” he asked as soon as the entered the living room, you sat on the couch, clearly tired, and he sat down in front of you on the coffee table grabbing your hands tenderly, the softness of his touch almost made you cry after the day you’d had, “what happened on that date?”

You sighed “I just told him I wanted to be friends” you whispered glancing at the floor “I never knew how curious people could be about me not wanting to go on dates. Michael asked and I wasn’t sure how to explain him that when he asked me it felt different.

“Different?” he asked.

“It felt right” you answered and couldn’t ignore the way his jaw clenched.

“I don’t want to be like the people here, Peter” you explained quietly “people like to just see people to keep themselves entertained, that’s not what I want. What do you want?” you asked him. “I guess...” he started thinking “I want someone who’s going to make me feel that I have everything in the world, who sets a before and after in my life.”

You crossed your legs in butterfly, leaning a little into him and not letting go of his hands “I know what everyone says about not overthinking the future and living in the moment, but I feel like if you’re not dating for marriage, you’re dating for heartbreak. Maybe not even marriage, but a lifetime commitment” you explained gently playing with his fingers, he decided to return the touch “you want to get married?” he asked cautiously.

“Yeah. Someday” you replied.

The Sun had started to fall pretty quickly, leaving you in darkness except for the soft light of the lamp pole outside the window, since neither of you had turned the lights on on your way in.

“And you want that to be with the one” he continued. He didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe he was doing what he thought he was doing. Maybe he was doing something completely different.

“I know it sounds dumb, childish” you sighed “but I believe that God created each and one of us for someone else, that there is a particular person out there that is meant to fit us. I know that’s part of the plan He has for every one of us.”

Until this day, Peter had never really heard you talk about God, conversations simply never led to that topic, but know he just couldn’t take his eyes off of you, he couldn’t stop dreaming about what you were saying. You were practically whispering, so he leaned into your voice.

“And when I pray for love” you proceeded “I don’t pray for Him to send me someone. Michael is someone, the guys on the hall were someone, Mark, John and Carlos are someone. I don’t want someone. I want not a boyfriend but a life-mate. I want the love of my life.”

The two had, unconsciously, leaned into each other, your faces inches away, your slow breathing hitting each other’s face.

“How will you know when you find the right person?” you were still playing with each other’s fingers.

“Maybe I won’t right away” you said after a couple seconds, looking at the mess of your fingers in his while his eyes lingered on your face “that happens to a lot of people, but I don’t know if it will be the same for me. I don’t expect to be love at first sight, but maybe familiarity. One day looking into their eyes and seeing everything you want in life, feeling the hand your meant to hold the rest of your days” slowly, you intertwined his fingers with yours.

You looked at him, despite the darkness in the room, gazing into his lips, his jaw, his nose, his cheeks, his eyes... You thought about him in the last couple of years, how he had cared for you, opened you to his life, how you almost looked for him after a test, a hard lecture or simply a bad day, longing for his embrace, how you had went to his place as soon as your date was over, the way you always seemed to gravitate towards him...

Haltingly you leaned into each other, almost as if physically pulled. Your lips where slightly parted as his own brushed the tip of them softly, your own breath got stucked in your chest at the feeling of his touch but that didn’t stop you from ending the gap and meeting his kiss.

It was slow, caring, even careful, completely unhurried as you felt a complete fulfillness wash over you, fitting perfectly on his soft lips and feeling something similar to when you’re putting together a puzzle and one of the pieces falls right into place. His hand found a place in the back of your neck to sweetly pull you closer, if possible, and your hand cupped his cheek.

“I think it’s you, Peter Parker” you whispered “It’s going to be you.”

[higuchimon]

[fanfic] Ways To The Soul

“So what kind of a soulmate mark do you have?” The question came from one of her classmates; she couldn’t remember their name anymore. It had been a good many years since then. But it was innocent – almost everyone asked that kind of question sooner or later, especially if the answer wasn’t obvious.

Not all of the ways were. Not everyone had a clearly marked countdown on them or a mark waiting to glow at the right time or a name written on themselves. There were less obvious ways, of course, such as sharing dreams or healing via touch or when one couldn’t see colors until meeting one’s soulmate. There were even a few rarer ones – such as those who sprouted wings upon meeting their soulmate.

And in all of her years, Asuka hadn’t experienced any of that. No signs or clocks or names upon her, and she’d never shared a dream or felt anyone else’s thoughts and she could see colors as well as anyone else.

But they asked. It was just a thing. Sometimes marks didn't show up right away, after all.

“You really don’t need to worry about it,” Fubuki told her one afternoon, not long before he was to start his first year at Duel Academia. “I mean, there are so many ways that you could find a soulmate!” He strummed a little at his ukulele. He still wasn’t very good at that.

“I didn’t say I was worried about it,” Asuka replied, going through her deck. She still had two years before she could start at the Academy, but she did have a very important duel against one of her friends that weekend and she wanted to do her very best.

Fubuki blinked at her. “I know you are. You don’t have to lie to me. You’re worried because you’re one of the rare ones.” He tapped his fingers on his instrument for a few seconds. “You know, I bet you’re a Name-speaker. So there’s no way you’ll know your soulmate until they say your name.”

Asuka debated the ethics of grabbing the nearest magazine and whacking him upside the head. It was a very tempting thought. She kept her focus on her deck instead. The magazine hadn’t been invented yet that could get through his thick skull.

Why won’t he believe me? As far back as she could remember, she’d never been interested in having a soulmate. Once she’d checked out a book from the library about all the different ways that one could find one’s soulmate, and spent a very informative weekend checking herself to be sure that she didn’t possess any of them. She’d contorted herself into many unusual configurations making sure that there weren’t any marks on her back before giving up and asking Junko to check for her.

She’d never had a mark. She decided at a very young age that she didn’t want a mark. There were a couple of people that as she got older, she found mildly interesting but that was it – a mild interest than happily settled itself into warm friendships over and over.

Time ticked by, as it had a habit of doing. Fubuki went on to Duel Academia and vanished before the ending of his first year. Asuka held fast to the hope that he would return – Fubuki carried a song in his heart, a beautiful melody that his soulmate would know the other half of when they heard him singing. Because of that, he would return. She held faith in that.

Being able to spend time with Ryou helped ease the loss of her brother. She never asked about the odd mark on his right hand – the one grayed out, as if his soulmate perished. He never talked about it either.

She met others who had marks or signs of some kind. Juudai proudly showed off the name on his left arm, written in yellow and green – Yubel. A name she’d never heard of before – nor had Juudai. He held out hope that he would meet them one day, though.

Momoe’s timer wouldn’t run down until she was close to twenty-five. Junko already shared dreams with someone who she wouldn’t name. A few casual conversations she overheard indicated other options – rumor had it that Ayanokouji Mitsuru and Kouchou Ran ended up as soulmates, having brushed against each other at a duel tournament and knowing in that moment.

Quite honestly, Asuka could hardly go anywhere without talk of soulmates. They were almost as hot a topic as dueling was. At least Ryou never spoke of his mark, and once Juudai determined that no one in school knew who Yubel was, he was far more interested in talking dueling anyway. Misawa looked forward to late May of the following year, when his mark decreed he would meet his soulmate. Manjoume didn’t have a mark either, but he told a few tales about how his family tended to have the rarer signs, such as being a HealTouch or a TruthTeller. He had hopes of turning out to be a Name-speaker himself.

Shou’s mark was different from Ryou’s. Not all family members who had marks shared them, after all. His mark wasn’t one o the visible ones – he couldn’t see color at all, and wouldn’t until he met his soulmate.

Hayato had a name on his wrist as well, not one that anyone recognized. He said nothing about it, but Asuka suspected that he hoped he’d meet this “Sugiyama Takara” when he went to Industrial Illusions.

With every year that passed, there were more people who had marks. Some of them didn’t ask about hers – she would forever be grateful that Jim Cook wanted to talk more about geology than the mark on his own hand – but there were always those who could not help but press to know about hers and so many of them offered the same platitudes when they found out that she didn’t have one.

Most of those were the same ones that Fubuki offered before, promising that there were so many different ways that just because she didn’t have one now didn’t mean she’d never have one. It could happen any time. Maybe she was just a late bloomer. There would be someone for her.

“Maybe I don’t want someone!” Asuka snapped finally, on a day close to the end of her third year, when Fubuki checked in again to make sure she hadn’t had any shared dreams or unusual emotions overnight.

Fubuki stared at her, mouth open slightly, but no words coming out. He blinked a few times before he did manage to say anything.

“Are you sure?”

At least he didn’t deny the possibility. She gave him that much credit.

“Not yet. But it’s the best option I see so far.” She’d never really been more than superficially interested in anyone anyway, and never romantically. Potential dueling opponents only interested her. Not to mention she hadn’t yet decided what it was she wanted to do with her life. She waffled between teaching – which did have an appeal – and trying to enter the Pro Leagues or entering research related to dueling. Ayukawa-sensei had also suggested that she study medicine for duel purposes. With more injuries turning up related to the game, those who knew how to deal with that kind of ailment remained in high demand.

There was just always so much to do that wasn’t romantic and she wanted to do it.

Fubuki drew in a long breath and, of all things, smiled at her. “All right. I’ll stop asking. If that’s what you want, then I just ask one thing.”

Asuka crossed her arms over her chest. “What?”

“If you ever do decide to date someone – with or without a soulmate mark – let me know, please?” He tried to look a little like a puppy dog but she’d seen all of his looks growing up. That meant nothing to her.

But what he asked, she could do. “I will. Just don’t wait for it.”

Fubuki nodded. Asuka suspected it would be abut a week before he asked again.

At least more people were finding their soulmates and thus had less to talk about with their marks. Juudai knew who Yubel was – had fused their souls together, in fact. Asuka had to say she’d never heard about that before. Hayato wrote them all a mass e-mail gleeing over having finally met Sugiyama Takara. They hadn’t started dating yet but Hayato hoped to ask his fellow card designer out for tea sometime in the near future.

Misawa had settled happily into the Amazon Village with Taniya. It hadn’t taken long before he’d built a device that could transmit between the worlds – sort of a souped up mobile phone, as he’d described it, and started to make arrangements for long-distance lessons. He would be graduating with them, even if he couldn’t physically be there.

She’d learned that Professor Chronos also didn’t have a soulmate identifier of any kind, and she’d spent some time with him just talking about how sometimes their lives were far less complicated than those of their friends. She would miss being here for him.

As soon as Juudai defeated Darkness, Ryou’s mark flared into full life again – as did the matching one of Fujiwara Yuusuke. They hadn’t spent much time apart since then, learning about one another all over again. A great deal had changed between the last time they’d seen one another and now.

Maybe she would develop a soulmate attachment or fall in love in a different way. Non soulmate relationships existed, after all. She could see it when O’Brien visited Sea God’s Priestess. But right now, that wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life, and she couldn’t imagine being any other way.

The End

Notes: Asuka is asexual/aromantic in this. She doesn’t have a romantic soulmate at all. If she were going to have a platonic one, it would probably be Jim and/or Mizuchi. I might go into further detail on some of the ships mentioned here, and ones I didn’t mention (such as Edo and Saiou, who share an emotional link once the Light isn’t an issue anymore). But not right now. I’m getting ready to start finishing WIPs and write stuff that’s not GX.

[lovemesomesurveys]

What is a recurring thought on your mind today? lol it’s 5 in the morning and I’m thinking about getting more egg rolls for lunch. I had been craving them for awhile and finally had some last night and now I want more. Have you had any confrontations with anyone lately? No. What is the last charity you donated to? A cancer research charity. Do you feel all fuzzy and good when you do a good deed? It does feel good to do good. Don’t ya just hate foot cramps? I wouldn’t know, but I get stomach cramps and they’re not fun at all, so I imagine a foot cramp isn’t either.

Would you say you have an infectious laugh? I don’t think so.  Shouldn’t you be doing something else right now? Sleeping, but c’mon when do I ever go to bed before 7 or 8AM anymore? Do you have anything planned for the summer? Couldn’t do anything this summer. I’m so glad we’re in August though and summer is almost overrrrrr. What is something you worry about often? Health related things. Constantly. Are there any mountains nearby where you live? No. Did you like to collect frogspawn as a kid? No.  Do you walk fast or slow? I’m a fast wheeler I’m told. Do you keep birthday cards or throw them out? I keep them. I don’t get very many anymore, though.  Would you consider yourself healthy? Both mind and body. Nope, not in any way. Do you play any team sports? Nope. If so, which position do you play? - Does sitting in waiting rooms drive you insane? Yes. I’m very impatient and the waiting just makes me more anxious. What form of public transport do you use most often? I don’t take any public transportation anymore, but I used to take the bus sometimes in college. Would you consider yourself an adrenaline junkie? Ha, no.  Do you ever go onto ‘failblog’? I’m not familiar with that. Have you ever been arrested? If so, why? No. Do you ever put sticky notes around the place to remind yourself of things? No. I use the reminder app on my phone and/or write it down on my marker board. Would you eat a spider for $50? Absolutely NOT. Nopeeeeeee. Would you rather be a kangaroo or a koala? Koala, I guess. What is a common slang word from where you live? ”Hella” used to be a very Californian thing, but everyone says it now so I don’t know. Do you keep your fingers on the home keys when you type? I don’t type the proper way. I’ve been on the computer and typing since I was a kid, I even took a typing class, but I still don’t type the proper way haha. How I type works for me, though, sooo. *shrug* Are you easy to talk to? People have told me that. Can you juggle with more than two items? I can’t juggle. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I tried to juggle. Has anyone ever assumed you can’t speak English? No, but people have assumed that I speak Spanish. Do you live in a rural or an urban area? Urban. At airports do you ever worry your luggage won’t arrive? It crossed my mind. Do your parents ever call you ‘pet’ or ‘sweetheart’ etc? Not those two specifically, but other terms of endearment. We have our own that we’ve made up for each other as well. If so, does it annoy you? No, not at all. Do you like jalapenos? I loved ‘em, but I can’t eat spicy food anymore. :( What other windows have you currently got opened? Just this one. What woke you up this morning? I haven’t gone to bed, yet, but when I get up it’ll be well past morning. I don’t even go to bed until the morning. :/ Who else is in the same building as you? My parents, brother, and doggo are home as well. Would you like a penny farthing bicycle? A what? Your name? Stephanie. Would you ever consider visiting Ireland? Sure. Would you like to visit Venice? Yes. Did you ever eat leaves when you were a kid? Uh, no. I wasn’t the kid who played in leaf piles or played with/ate dirt or anything.  What is the largest body of water near your hometown? California is near the Pacific. Do you have any flags in your house? Yes. Are there any ‘keep off the grass’ signs where you live? Not in my neighborhood that I know of, but yeah some public places in town do. Have you ever walked on the grass with such a sign? No. Are you double-jointed? My thumbs are. At school which area of science did you prefer: biology/chemistry/physics? I managed to get by in science, but it wasn’t my favorite. Which did you prefer between geography/history? History. Have you ever had a main part in a play? No. Are there any musical instruments in the room you’re in? No. Can you name a difference between RNA and DNA? Uhhh. I’m blanking. Do you know anyone who owns a farm? No. Have you ever driven a tractor? No. Does the smell of the countryside bother you? It’s quite pungent, ha. I guess if you live out there you get used to it, but anytime I drive through the country I just gag. Do you drink more water or juice? Water. I don’t drink juice at all.

Sweater weather or tank top weather? Which do you prefer. Sweater weather, most definitely.  Have you ever kissed a Zachary? No. Do you hate when people try to embarrass you? Uh, well yeah. Do you like in October when a bunch of haunted places open up? I don’t go to any, but yeah. I just love spooky season in general. Did you tell someone you loved them today? Not so far. Do you watch the show Ghost Adventures? No. My dad watches it, though, so I’ve seen parts of it here and there. What color are your curtains in your bedroom? Dark blue. Are you superstitious? I do the knock on wood thing, but I think that’s really just out of habit. Is there a cat in the room you’re in right now? No, I don’t have a cat. What’s your favorite thing to do on the weekend? I don’t do anything different from weekdays. All my days are the same. Do you have your license? No. Do you still watch cartoons? I still watch Rugrats, Doug, and Hey Arnold. And animated movies. Do you like to cook? Only ramen. Do you drink? Nope. Do you smoke? Nope. Where do you buy your clothes? Hot Topic, Boxlunch, Adidas website, and Kohl’s.  Do you enjoy going to the movies? Yes. I miss being able to go. Are you still in school? Nopeeee, I’m done. Do you like cupcakes? Yes.

What makes you sad? A lot of things. I’m also just a sad, sleepy, sensitive soul as I like to say. Are you an animal lover? Yes. Are you hot-headed? I’m not quick to anger, but I do get irritated and frustrated quite easily. Do you have any siblings? I have 2 brothers. Are you afraid of snakes? YES. Do you have any pets? Yes, I have a doggo. <3 What color are your eyes? Brown. How bout your hair? I dye it red, but it’s naturally dark brown. How tall are you? Like 5′4. Who do you live with? My parents, brother, and doggo. Is there anything you want to ask anyone right now? No. Do you have kids? No. Do you love your family? Yes. They’re my world. What color hair do you prefer on the gender of your choice? I don’t really care. How bout eye color? Blue and green eyes are gorgeous.  Do you have a job? If so, what? No.  What is your dream job? I don’t have one. :/ What did you “wanna be” when you were a little kid? A teacher. What’s your favorite kind of movie? Psychological thrillers, horror, drama, romcoms, comedy, some action/adventure, /sci-fi... I like a variety. Are you gay, straight, bi, lesbian, asexual, or not sure? Straight. What kind of music is your favorite? I like variety. Do you play any instruments or sing? What kind? No. Have you ever been to a concert? If so, what was your favorite one? Yeah, several. I enjoyed them all, concerts are just awesome. It’s a cool experience.  Are you more negative or more positive? Negative. Well, for myself. I can be positive for others. Have you ever been depressed? I have chronic depression. How are you feeling, dear? Tired and crappy. Mhm and how’s the weather where you’re at? It’s 6AM and it’s already 64F.  Okay and have you been healthy lately? No. Are you in middle school, high school, college, graduate? I’m done with school. What is/was your favorite class? English was always my favorite and then in college I was able to take psych courses, which is also what I majored in, so I liked those. Have you made any life altering decisions lately? No. Where is your favourite place to get pizza? This local place.

Do you have any physical traits that are bothering you lately? My hair.

What is the closest store to you? A grocery store. Do you have any songs currently stuck in your head? Not at the moment. Have you made a CV? No. I had to Google what a CV was.  Where is the last place you applied for a job? (If you have) I haven’t. Are you photogenic? Nope. Are there any concert venues where you live? Yes. Are you annoyed at anyone these days? I’m always annoyed with myself. Which continent would you most like to travel to and why? Europe. There’s a ton of places I’d like to visit. Have you ever/would you ever do volunteer work? I’ve done a lot of volunteer work. Do you know anyone that has died in a road accident? No. Do you know which career path you want to follow? No. Are there a lot of tourists where you live? No. There’s not shit to do or see of interest here. My state is a touristy state, though. Any plans for your next birthday? This year I obviously just stayed home, but my family made it nice. My brother got me coffee, breakfast, and a coffee cake from my favorite place, my mom, brother, and I watched this new creepy movie, You Should Have Left, then we just hung out until dinnertime, which was my fave, Wingstop, and then I opened presents.

Do you have to use public transport often? Not at all anymore, but when I was in college I had to take the bus sometimes. Does your house have an alarm? Yes. Have you ever asked someone out on a date? No. Whose grave did you last visit? My dog, Brandie, is buried in our backyard. My dad made a really nice gravesite for her. What’s something someone can do that makes you melt? A guy that can play the piano. What are you listening to right now? An ASMR video  If you won a lot of money on the lottery, what would you buy first? The first thing after paying off debts would be a new house for my family and I. What’s your greatest fear?  Death, disease, bugs, clusters. <<<< SAME. Gaaaaah the last one just made my skin crawl from seeing the word. Those are just a few of many fears for me. Has anyone upset you in the last week? Yes. What’s the best thing about you? I like my cheesy, corny sense of humor. What’s your favorite drink? Coffee. What are you going to do tomorrow? Same stuff I do everyday. What are you craving? I want more egg rolls like I had last night. How did you sleep last night? I don’t ever feel like I slept well. I never wake up feeling well rested. Does that really happen for people cause I can’t relate.

What was the first thing you thought this morning? I haven’t gone to bed, yet.

If your favorite food gave you pain, made you have acne, etc., would you still eat it? I’d just have to eat it less often and less of it. Unless it made me really sick or something or was very intense and unpleasant. Like I can’t have spicy food at all anymore except for the weak hot sauce that has like less than 2% of anything, but even that I can only have a little bit of. I can’t drench my food in it, just light dips. It sucks cause I used to be obsessed with spicy food, and I used to eat really spicy stuff.

Have you ever been judged on something you wore? Yeah.

Are you a timid person? Yes.

Think QUICK what word begins with c? Coffee!

Are you a funny person? I think I have my funny moments and now and then and trust me, when they happen I make sure to own ‘em cause they’re rare haha.  Be honest, do you go for looks more or personality? Personality is the most important, looks only go so far. Personality goes on a much deeper level and who a person is matters a lot more to me than their looks. That being said, I can’t say looks don’t matter at all. I also want to add that a good personality can add to someone’s attractiveness. 

Ever been so upset but didn’t understand why? Yeah. I get these moody moods that are sometimes triggered, but there’s a lot of times where they seem to just come on out of nowhere. I suppose it’s the depression, but like I can be having a decent day and then suddenly I’ll feel my mood changing and nothing in that moment changed that would seem to cause the sudden change. I just feel it coming on and once it does, I can’t stop it. My emotions very much control me. 

Are you a flirty person? No. I can be if I’m interested in someone and I’m comfortable around them enough to be flirty. Though, it’s probably subtle. 

Are you homophobic? No.

Ever had a rumor spread about you? No.

Has anyone ever pulled your pants down in public? Nooo. 

Ever had the ‘birds and the bees’ talk with your parents? Yeah.

How would you react if someone said you ruined their life? Wow. I would feel extremely bad and shitty to say the least.

Are you a sympathetic person? Yes. I’m also very empathetic. 

Ballet dance or hip hop dance? If I could, I would have tried hip hop. What’s currently bothering you right now? My stomach. 

What is the most athletic you’ve done? When I had to participate in my adaptive PE classes. That’s literally the only time.

Do you remember the first conversation you ever had with the person you currently have feelings for? I don’t have those kinds of feelings for anyone at the moment.

Do you like to drink herbal tea? Yeah, now and then. I’m not a big tea drinker.

If you’re home alone, do you still close/lock the door when you use the bathroom? No.

What your favorite thing to have on toast? Butter.

Has anyone ever hung up on you? Yeah, but only like telemarketers and wrong numbers.

Have you ever been to a concert? Several. Hasn’t this come up a couple times? Maybe I’m getting the surveys confused, I’m tired.

Can you speak more than one language? If so, what other language(s)? Not fluently, just some Spanish.

Are you talking to anyone right now? No.

If so, how do you feel about them? -

Do you know anyone who skateboards? Not anymore.

Do you ever sing when you’re alone? Yeah.

What’s the stupidest song you’ve listened to today? I have’t listened to any stupid songs. I don’t listen to music I’d consider stupid. Are you listening to music, currently? No.

How do you feel about the song? - When someone teases you do you frown or give an amazing comeback? My family and I playfully tease each other and sometimes I’ll come up with something funny and clever to say, but there’s times where I’m just like             -____- and say like, “har-har very funny” haha or something lame like that. Do you think you can sing? I know I can’t sing well at all, but I still like to anyway to myself.

Do you have any talent? No.

Do you think you’re better looking than some other people? No.

Do you like dancing? I like head bobbing and moving my shoulders/arms/hands, ha. And sometimes I attempt (very badly) to do some TikTok dances haha. Privately, though. I’d never recored myself and share it with the public, major yikes. 

What’s your favorite zoo animal? Giraffes.

How is your hair currently styled? It’s up in a messy bun. 

How long are your showers (on average)? Like 30-40 minutes.

East or West? West.

What did you do last night? Binged some Step by Step on Hulu until 1AM-ish, then I made my ramen and watched some YouTube videos while I ate, then I played some Animal Crossing for a bit, and then I scrolled through Tumblr for awhile, and then I did some surveys and listened to ASMR, which is what I’m still doing now.

Do you like your music loud? I like it at a comfortable volume. Some songs I have a little louder than others, just depends.

What are you allergic to? Tangerines. I also have seasonal allergies.

Do you ever stay up late just to be awake I have insomnia, but yeah I do stay up later than I should. Like, I could attempt sleep a little sooner than I do.

What do you want to name your children? I don’t want to have kids.

Would you ever write a letter to someone you haven’t met yet, like your future spouse? Nah.

Did the last movie you watched make you cry? No. It was a psychological thriller, it was trippy.

Are you a good swimmer? Nope, I can’t swim.

What are you always thinking about? Health stuff. 

Is science your favorite subject? Well, psychology is a science. When you’re really worked up, what do you do to relax? Listen to ASMR.

Would you rather spend the day watching movies or on an intense hike? Uh, watching movies. Definitely. I can’t go hiking anyway, but I wouldn’t want to do anything intense or outdoors.

Did you ever try the cereal Special K? Yeah, there’s nothing special about it.

Think of the last person you kissed, was it memorable? Yeah.

You have the choice of being poor but happy, or rich but miserable. Which is it? Poor and happy. 

Do you think girls with short hair are less good looking than those with long hair? Uh, no? There’s a lot of beautiful people with short hair and there’s a lot of beautiful people with long hair.

[star-anise]

do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”.  It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women. 

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women.  And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

[axemetaphor]

Character Backstory: Domino Dog

finally got Domino’s backstory all straightened out in a way that I can comfortably share w yall! this is a long post, but hopefully it’s fun to read. Warnings are placed before potentially-triggering content but overall their story has a big warning for child abuse, though it’s not written out in great detail. 

ETA 2020, I think it’s important to note this backstory is from Domino’s perspective, and sometimes, things aren’t entirely accurate! This is part fact, part what they believe has happened.

Domino was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 13th around twenty-ish years ago. Christened “----,” they spent the first twelve years of their life growing up in Glasgow before their family emigrated to New York in search of work. They spent much of their time alone, as their family was fond of locking them out of the house, viewing the puppy as a nuisance constantly underfoot. (Domino got in the way of their parents’ fighting, mostly.) Due to this they developed a love for foot-travel early on in life and quite a lot of stamina to walk for hours on end in any sort of weather. They didn’t have many good things growing up, and haven’t held on to many items from that time in their life, the only notable object being a small solar-powered handheld video game console they played endlessly on days when it was too hot and sunny to walk. (They also still own a hoodie, pair of jeans and a tank top from that era, because it’s what they were wearing when they left home.)

At the age of around seven it was already obvious that they were a little… off. They didn’t get along with other children, primarily on account of being a dog but secondarily because they were already clearly nonbinary, but had no vocabulary to express it yet. Both these factors made it very hard for them to fit in with any group, and left them feeling like a stranger no matter where they went—no place for them at home or at school. They grew up quiet and reserved and shy, not too far off from how they are now but with much less of a spine. 

Their family moved to New York when they were twelve, and they attempted a fresh start. It didn’t go well; they still could not relate to people at all, and being in a completely new country didn’t help at all. Things were still tense at home as living conditions didn’t improve, and the abuse they weathered only grew worse, but having grown up with it and never having any other families to compare it to (due to, well, having no friends) they were unaware it was abnormal. Their father left the family shortly after this.

At around age seventeen they’d wisened up to what was going on and began to try and plan some way to have a future away from their family. In addition, they finally learned about the LGBT+ community from a local shelter they quite literally stumbled upon while wandering especially far afield; they’d been entertaining the idea of simply running off from home, as their home dynamic only got even worse over the years, beginning with verbal abuse and ending with physical abuse, and so had decided that day to just walk as far as they could and spend a night sleeping in an alleyway. (They figured it would be good practice… they’ve never been the brightest of bulbs.) Through a bit of conversation with the staff and residents, they learned what being nonbinary was, and immediately knew it fit them. (Unfortunately they did not learn about asexuality or aromanticism until much later.) They returned home with the triumphant announcement… 

It didn’t go well. But that was the first night they ever stood up for themself, and the fights after that time were a lot less one-sided. 

A year or so after that, once they’d graduated from high school and (earlier in the year) turned 18, their mother kicked them out of the house for refusing to let go of their nonbinary identity, along with other contrived grievances. They scrounged together enough money before leaving (having known it was an eventuality, they’d been saving up) to buy a one-way train ticket out of state and never looked back. 

And so began their life as a vagabond of sorts, completely independent and entirely isolated. For a half year they wandered as far afield as they could, having absolutely no goal, and entirely nameless. They discovered they quite liked being alone rather than being lonely, and, given the self-sufficiency their shitty life forced on them from a young age, they did perfectly fine for themself, all alone. That is, until they ended up running into a rather large, powerful gang in Georgia, who immediately saw a use for them. The gang offered them a place to stay, and they accepted without much thought; through that they learned how to truly stand up for themself, how to use a switchblade knife better than before, and who they really were. This was a huge period of growth in terms of their personality; namely, they actually had the space to develop one. They grew to love the goth subculture and frequented a lot of somewhat-shady goth clubs; this was the fashionable period of their life and they finally felt in-charge of their appearance as well as the way they were perceived. To this day they keep up a more gothic sort of aesthetic, as the androgyny common in the subculture serves them well. 

It was also during this time that they earned a new name for themself. Newest members to the gang were simply called “Rookie” or “Newbie” and would be given a loyalty test to ‘earn’ a new name after a certain point (which, in Domino’s hindsight, is a little bit cult-ish), and Domino passed their ‘test’ with flying colours. 

(TW for murder, assault)

Their test was a hired hit on a man who assaulted the daughter of the gang-leader and got out on bail. He was a repeat offender, and the gang-leader finally decided the world had had enough of the piece of shit; it is the one time Domino has ever killed anyone in cold blood, and the one time the gang ever asked any of their Newbies to murder. 

It earned Domino both their name and the role of “attack dog,” going after the gang’s most stubborn opponents. Even though they’re only five-foot-five-and-some-change, they can be quite intimidating; having never learned proper dog etiquette, they are not at all afraid of biting and clawing the hell out of someone in a fight. They prefer knives for their efficiency but they absolutely can and will bite someone’s neck out if they have to, and their general demeanor when pissed makes that… obvious. That being said, given how easily-identifiable an anthropomorphic dog with bright red hair is, they were only sent after the difficult folks who would only suffer worse if they went to the police. 

By that point they’d made a lot of good friends in the gang, but the one they were closest to was a girl called Faith. Faith was enamoured with them from the beginning, but they didn’t catch on whatsoever, which eventually ended with the friendship souring after Faith made an (unsolicited) move on Domino, which shocked and unnerved the dog. Faith, not handling rejection well, refused to speak to Domino again, calling them frigid and dead-hearted. The memory still hurts, and made them wary of befriending anyone else for a while, lest they once again miss the “obvious” cues towards a romantic relationship. These days they fancy themself more aware, but really, they’re not at all, they’re just much better at deterring people in general by… well, by being a jackass, in short.

(TW for alcohol mention/alcohol abuse, drugs)

Their gang unfortunately had to disband after a police raid captured a good amount of them. Domino fled with a few of the other members of the gang, headed north away from the gang’s usual stomping grounds (in the hopes they’d evade jail), and fell into something akin to a worse depression than before, if possible. They’d always used alcohol as a bit of a coping mechanism and social crutch, though not to excess before, but at this point in life—having had both a purpose in life and power unlike that which they’d had before, only to have it ripped from them—they felt their lowest since joining the gang. Fortunately they were cognizant enough to realize it was getting to be a problem right at the tipping-point-of-sorts where it would have/could have veered into hardcore alcoholism and, fearing ending up like their parents, they quit it cold-turkey and haven’t had a drink since, nor will they even talk about it. They’re embarrassed by the possibility of even letting themself get that bad-off with it and petrified of being categorized as anything similar to their parents. 

The next few months consisted of the little rag-tag group traveling north, bouncing from motel to motel with what little money they had left, usually spending their time high as a kite lying on the bathroom floors. (Domino still tends to lie on tile floors when they’re upset about something, for reasons even they can’t fathom.) After around three months, during which the group fragmented more and more until it was just Domino and three other people, one of the group was informed by a relative that there were good job opportunities in New York City—namely, a pizza place needed drivers. The group member informed Domino of this opportunity because Domino was (and is) a fairly decent driver and, having nowhere else to go and being painfully aware of where their current path might lead, decided to go for it.

At nearly-nineteen, they finally reached New York City, and were immediately given a job on the credentials of being alive, mostly functional, and capable of knowing where the driver’s seat in a car is. They had no home or car, but they did have a knack for hotwiring cars, and some fool left theirs unattended for more than five minutes; thus began their first legal gainful employment. They worked that job long enough to become a sort of Designated Indestructible Employee—they were sent to the deliveries no one else wanted to do, either because the person ordering lived in the most dangerous areas or because they were a creep. Domino has a bizarre knack for not dying despite getting themself into incredibly dangerous situations, and maintaining a blasé attitude about the whole thing as well. In addition to that, their reputation precedes them, as most of the local gangs already knew about Attack Dog Domino and were most definitely not keen to get on their bad side; many were quite surprised to find a relatively-pleasant, quiet dog behind the brutal stories. No one was too keen to push the envelope, though, even though Domino did not reprise their role for a New York gang. They’d decided they were done with gangs, mostly due to not really wanting to have any friends anymore.

That being said, they began going to see Sybil (when she was a psychotherapist, so, somewhere around season 1) to sort through the absolute mess of their mental state. It took them a long while to be comfortable enough with Sybil to open up about the past few years of their life, and they’re still not comfortable enough to talk about their childhood, but they continue to make progress; they went from Sybil being the only person they’d speak to (outside of work) to having 3 roommates in their apartment to ease the cost of rent and somewhat-adopting a mischievous rabbit named Joey [owned by archielemon] as their sister. Getting them out of their shell has proven to be a slow process with quite a ways to go, but they are slowly becoming less guarded. While Sybil’s therapy helps them deal with whatever trauma may remain, it’s been Joey who’s taught them how to open up to people in a more healthy manner, and, thanks to her, they’re a lot happier, generally speaking. They still have bad days, of course, but they feel less miserable and are finally starting to learn how to let other people in, and begin to process what’s happened to them. 

Their career as a pizza-delivery-person came to an unfortunate end when the pizza joint was destroyed during Monster-Max’s rampage at the end of Season 3, while Domino was briefly out of town for a vacation of sorts. They came back to find most of the city, including the apartment building they lived in, at least partially destroyed. From then, they were once again listless, but no longer coping with it alone—while their roommates left for greener pastures, they still had Joey and her girlfriend, Kathy [also owned by archielemon], who is also someone they consider a friend. This second bout of unemployment thankfully didn’t last long, as they ended up meeting Flint Paper through an odd series of events. As it turns out, their family were curious to see how they were doing (read as, their mother wanted to see if they had any income to exploit, unaware of Domino’s newfound emotional strength as well as the general insanity of New York), and hired Flint to tail Domino and report back. Something in Domino reminded Flint of a different listless young dog he once met, and so he decided to take them under his wing, just as he had done twenty-five years ago; at first, they declined, believing they wouldn’t be good at it, but after receiving encouragement from their roommates (as well as having their natural knack for figuring out people’s motives pointed out to them) they decided to track Flint down themself and rescind their rejection.

Since then, they’ve been working alongside him as his apprentice-of-sorts. After a while he started to treat them more like something between an adopted child and a pet dog, which they don’t particularly mind, surprisingly. This has brought them into more contact with Sam and Max than before (they’d delivered pizzas to the duo before, and simply thought them a very, very strange married couple), who, at this point, they view as a mild but funny nuisance. They don’t have much in common with the Freelance Police, though the anarchist side of them does appreciate their personalized take on justice that seems to have a more accurate and reasonable aim than the vocational police. They consider them somewhat-reliable and it’s been proven that, when in a pinch, they might consult the duo for help.

Recently, they reunited with their little brother Adam, and since then the two have been closer than ever, although they had quite a rocky start to it. They do their best to be some sort of a good role model for him, though they’re not always successful... but they try pretty hard. They’ve done their best to keep their act cleaned-up, and they converted the living room of their apartment into a permanent pillow fort so there would be space enough for everyone to sleep. They’re quite protective over Adam, though not to a stifling degree. They tend to take care of him before they’d take care of themself, is all.

These days Domino is a more… balanced individual than before. Working with Flint helps them channel aggression in a (debatably) more positive manner, and in their off-time they’ve taken to wandering the streets. Having always been an urban explorer and slight packrat, they have a tendency to acquire virtually any items not nailed-down in abandoned buildings. Amusingly, these do sometimes come in handy during their cases… but not as often as they’d like. A majority of their finds collect dust in their room until they pitch them out the window in the spirit of “spring cleaning.” Near the first day of spring, standing outside their window is a nice way to find new treasures. Or new head traumas. Whichever!

[kaikiky]

getting to “aromantic”

ASAW 2019 Prompt 1 | February 17-18 | Discovery : How did you learn you were aromantic or arospec?

So, I’m really bad at participating in community things. I want to, but I have all this baggage in my past from when I would try to enter into something and then just get ignored until I drifted out again. So I became convinced a long time ago that there’s no point to being a member of anything.

But I saw the prompt for today and it made me want to write down my history regarding aromanticism.

(long post under the cut)

I don’t actually remember when I learned about aromanticism, but I’m guessing it was some time in 2013, maybe when I encountered the SAM. Since I can’t remember how I felt at the time I found it, I’ll just do a walk-through of how it all looks to me from my current perspective.

My asexuality has never been in question, because I’ve never wanted sex either on a conscious level or a physical level. But I have had desires for close, intimate relationships. When I was in elementary school, I had a best friend, and that was the person I felt closest to, the person I imagined being with the rest of my life. We talked about how when we had kids (we were like, seven years old at the time, so I could still talk about having kids in a hypothetical way without feeling viscerally repulsed) they would marry each other and then we could be siblings. I was literally imagining being best friends with her my whole life and it was awesome.

And then my family moved and she stopped contacting me, and I was devastated. It’s still a kind of trauma for me being dropped by my best friend, who I had been planning to spend my life with. To me, she was all I had, but she was popular and had a lot of people to replace me with. It destroyed me. It’s part of why I’m scared to talk to people who already have friends because I think, well, if they have friends already they don’t need me. I’m unnecessary.

I never wanted a lot of friends, I only ever wanted one best friend, because I’m an introvert. I don’t have a lot of energy to spend on people, so I wanted that one person who I could give all my social time and attention to. If I had to spread my social energy out among a bunch of people, there was no way I could get close to anyone. So in order to have enough energy to form a deep relationship, I needed there to be just one person.

But I could never find anyone who seemed right. I would have some school-friends, but no one who had the right vibe to them, the kind that made me feel like “this is someone I want to be with the rest of my life”, so I didn’t invest much in them. I was friendly, but I didn’t bother getting too deep because I knew we were going to move on from each other eventually.

And we did.

I went all through school and graduated high school without any real friends, and I was fine with that (college was a bit more complicated...). I was too busy studying to have time for friends anyway. And honestly I was happy being single - in real life.

Instead, I spent my time fantasizing about fictional characters, the ones who seemed like the kind of people I wanted to have those deep, intimate relationships with. Even in my fantasies I was still an introvert who only wanted one relationship at a time. And I interpreted these fantasies as “romantic”, because it felt like the way people described romantic feelings: the fluttery sensation in your stomach and heart, that feeling like you want to be with them all the time and you can’t stop thinking about them, the giddy happiness when you see them, the excitement of feeling like you found “the one”. I had that when I thought about these characters.

But in my fantasies, there was no kissing or hand-holding or much romance-coded behaviors. There was always a lot of quiet intimacy, like talking about anything and everything, feeling like there was something special between us that there wasn’t with anyone else, going on adventures together and trusting in each other when we fought villains (rather than one being the fighter and one being helpless and needing protection). We were equals in all things and there was just this connection like we were always on the same wavelength with everything, so there was never any awkwardness or miscommunication or fights between us. We trusted and respected each other completely and prioritized each other and cared deeply about each other. It was this feeling of perfect compatibility that had nothing physical about it and was mostly just about feeling completely at ease with each other.

That was the kind of thing I fantasized about and wrote stories about, and when I was younger I thought that was romance? maybe? Because I knew that no one else thought of “best friends” as something that intimate. Best friends were like, something you had when you were in school, but you were supposed to grow out of that when you were older. But my idea of a relationship wasn’t something that you grew out of, it was the most intimate companionship you could ever have, and so if the name for that wasn’t “best friend” then I guess it was supposed to be romance.

So I thought I had all these “romantic” feelings for fictional characters because I thought they would be perfect intimate companions for me, people I related to on a deep level and who I thought I would be able to talk to about serious, deep subjects and who I would feel comfortable being close to. I had the feeling that if I was in a close relationship with them, I would have found the one person I wanted to spend all my social energy with.

(And just to be upfront, all the characters I felt this for were male characters, because honestly I don’t relate to or like 99.9% of female characters, and I’m sure that’s because writers don’t know how to write female characters, but there it is.)

So I had been on Tumblr since 2011, but I didn’t join any fandom niche until 2015, and for a while I performed the whole “ecstatic fangirl” role by reblogging pictures of my favorite characters and replying with gifs and all caps fawning and tags like I was having a heart attack over how hot they were. And like, I do think the characters are aesthetically attractive, but I played it up to a sensational degree because that just seemed like what you were supposed to do. But deep down, it felt fake. I didn’t want to focus on how they looked, I wanted to imagine having late-night conversations with them when no one else was around. I wanted to imagine being their partner in a dangerous fight when we had to have each other’s backs. I wanted to imagine wandering alone in the woods together. I wanted to imagine listening to music together and singing along and dancing.

And then of course, there was all the shipping. People coming up with all sorts of outrageous ships or outrageous “proofs” and metas for why the popular ships were canon. But to me, they were absolutely not canon. Every relationship that I interpreted as deeply intimate in a nonsexual nonromantic way, fandom hijacked and put on a pedestal as the ultimate ship. It alienated me from fandom in a way that made me deeply resentful. I was honestly stunned. The yugioh fandom was my first real experience with fandom, so I had had no idea how big shipping was until I stepped in and saw it flooding everything. And it made me angry that the relationships that had always mattered to me because they felt like exactly what I was looking for—deep, close companionship that wasn’t physical or dramatically romantic—were being coded as sexual and romantic.

It hurt me and made me so angry that eventually I dropped the performance of hyper fangirl because I stopped wanting to be part of the fandom. I wanted to retreat back into my own shell where the characters and their relationships were the way I had always interpreted them, not tainted by fandom’s twisted imagination.

And I think that was around the time that I figured out that I didn’t even understand what the fuck romance was. To me, romance seemed to be the kind of bullshit you saw in romcoms. Romance was the factor that made people do stupid things and get into fights over unnecessary miscommunications. It made people paranoid and jealous and possessive in an aggressive way. It made (stupid, ridiculous) drama that distracted from everything in the story that actually mattered. Basically, romance seemed unhealthy and undesirable. So when I finally made that connection that romance didn’t mean intimacy or love but meant unnecessary stupidity and drama, it was easier for me to identify as aromantic and identify those things as what I was repulsed by.

The feelings themselves are harder to separate. Like, I don’t know exactly what romantic love specifically is supposed to feel like as opposed to any other kind of love, but I do know that I’m uncomfortable with a lot of romance-coded behaviors like kissing and hand-holding and grand gestures of love (especially in public) or candlelight dinners or lots of hearts everywhere. Those things turn me off in a big way.

I just want the feeling of intimacy, of feeling like I’m known by someone completely and loved because of who I am, and that in turn I know that person completely and love everything about them. I don’t want the relationship to be defined by the things we go out of our way to do (like setting aside time specifically to go on dates), I want it to be defined by a natural feeling of rightness, like we can exist together and it feels good, like we just kind of naturally gravitate toward each other because our energies are the same, our personalities are the same, our morals and values and likes and dislikes are the same.

There was a time where the term “quoiromantic” felt right to me because of that confusion over what makes romantic love distinct from any other, and I still think that term makes sense. But because of the cultural obsession with romance, I got to a point where “aromantic” felt like the better fit because I actively reject that obsession, I reject the idea that romantic love is the highest kind of love, and I reject all the trappings that come with love that is interpreted as romantic.

So I don’t think of the way I feel toward these characters as romantic attraction anymore, and I think part of what attracted me to these characters in the first place was always because interpreted them as not being interested in romantic relationships either, so it made us a good fit.

[imagitory]

Hi guys – still working on the next chapter for Harry Potter and the Lack of Lamb Sauce, so to tide you guys over until it’s done, I thought I’d put down a list of personal headcanons for the cast (both canon and OCs). Some of these are backstory-related, some are sexuality/race/whatever else-related, and some are just catch-all. Some will crop up over the course of the story – some won’t. In the case of the canon characters, again, just be advised these are my headcanons, and if you see a character differently, that’s totally okay! Hope they entertain you!

My version of Harry is biracial. I see the Potters as being a British family with Indian roots, while the Evans family is white (in Petunia and her family’s case, painfully so).

My version of Hermione is black. I confess that for many years I’d imagined her as white partly due to the films’ casting of Emma Watson and partly due to the fact that I was once a little white curly girl starved for representation, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve really fallen in love with Black!Hermione because in a lot of ways, she reminds me of my stepmother, who was born in the Caribbean, specifically Tobago. Like Hermione, my stepmom grew up as a self-conscious, academic, rule-abiding perfectionist with few friends and a love of cats, and she worked her butt off to prove herself, graduating from Johns Hopkins with a PhD in microbiology. I lost her very suddenly just last year, and it’s been very comforting imagining Hermione as at least partially resembling her while writing her.

Astoria is the first non-Slytherin in the Greengrass family in about three hundred years – the last one, a great-great-great-uncle named Lev Greengrass, was a Gryffindor and ended up cutting himself off from his family and moving to the United States.

Kevin’s mother Hattie had been a Gryffindor at school. His Hufflepuff personality is much more like his father’s.

Owen’s mother Cynthia and his grandmother Gertrude (“Trudy”) were also Hufflepuffs; his grandfather Martin and the rest of his maternal family, however, was in Slytherin (hence their ancestral home in Salazar’s Grove).

Hannah’s mother Ophelia (also an alumnus of Hufflepuff and a Head Girl in her day) was a well-respected Apparition instructor employed by the Ministry of Magic. Her husband Gene (a Ravenclaw who took Ophelia’s last name due to it being better known and respected in the Wizarding World) works a desk job at a magical talent agency.

Lowry, the Bulstrode family house elf, used to take Millicent on outings to Diagon Alley when her parents were at work. Although they never bought anything, Florian Fortescue – feeling a pang of pity for the little girl walking alone with the family house elf – would often invite them into his ice cream parlor to sample his newest flavors.

Eddie Carmichael’s family is full of Dark-Wizard catchers – both of his fathers, aunt, and cousin are all Aurors, and his grandmother worked in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for over sixty years.

Dennis and Colin agree about just about everything, but one thing they can’t agree on is how they would react if their mother (who left their father after Dennis was born) tried to reach out to them. Colin has expressed nothing but hatred and resentment for her, but Dennis feels the urge to take the high ground and at least give her the chance to prove that she’s changed.

Just as I imagine the Potters as a British family with Indian roots, the Greengrasses have Israeli roots. The Greengrass sisters’ middle names are a hint to that, as both are Yiddish – Daphne Shayna (meaning “beautiful”) and Astoria Charna (meaning “black”).

Ironically Astoria’s middle name has an inverse meaning to that of her future husband’s – Draco Lucius Malfoy (named for his father, of course) has a middle name that means “light.”

The Goodfellow family has Greek roots. They still own a family summer home on the Greek island of Chios.

Kevin, Seamus, and Terence Goodfellow are gay.

Bridget and Arjuna are lesbians.

Hannah, Dean, Evander Goodfellow, Healer Jengu, and Remus Lupin are bisexual.

Ginny is pansexual.

Professor Vector is a homosexual trans woman.

Luna, Astoria, and Millicent are on the asexual spectrum; Luna is demiromantic, Astoria is heteroromantic, and Millicent is biromantic.

Terence’s husband Evander is the youngest of three sons who were all sorted into Hufflepuff and  is generally considered the most handsome of the batch. (Terence certainly agrees.)

The Belaji family are (naturally) of Indian descent, though they are newer additions than the Potters. Arjuna’s mother and father were both children of Indian immigrants.

Uric Cuffe, the owner and chief editor of the Stormer, was the only son born to the Cuffe family in his generation, but despite his respectable pedigree, he was never a very good student, partially thanks to arrogance and partially thanks to what his magical family did not realize was untreated ADHD. When he failed to get the OWL results needed to join the Auror Department like his family wanted, Uric tail-spinned in a downward spiral of resentment and self-pity, flunking most of his NEWT classes by the time he graduated. His uncle Barnabas (chief editor of the Daily Prophet) suggested Uric try writing, something he was always quite good at, and at first things appeared to be looking up, as Uric could make good money writing for Witch Weekly and other publications. But yet again Uric’s arrogance got in the way, for he was sick of having to write what other people wanted just to make ends meet, and so he founded his own paper (The Stormer) so he could write whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. Unfortunately most of what he wants to write largely entails the mad, rambling conspiracies that he’s conjured up about Muggles.

Colin was diagnosed with ADHD when he was eight years old. His father has always resisted medication, and fortunately Colin has developed his own coping mechanisms for his symptoms.

Arjuna’s mother Chaaya, although not formally diagnosed, has autism. She works part-time at a small wandshop in Godric’s Hollow, though due to personal preference she prefers to deal with the inventory rather than directly with customers. Her special interests are Charms and collecting and reading cookbooks.

Arjuna’s father Rohan works in the Department of Mysteries. His main area of work, though he’s not at liberty to divulge too much, lies in what Harry and crew call the “Time Room.” 

Even though they’ve been very close ever since first year, Arjuna has never been romantically interested in her BFF Astoria.

Even though Bridget has only been explicit about her sexuality with Hermione and Ginny so far (at least, amongst the Gryffindors), Harry and Ron both subconsciously sensed it just through their interactions with Bridget, to the extent that they’d probably laugh if anyone suggested she had a crush on a guy. Luna of course picked it up at once.

That’s all I’ve got right now...hope you got something out of this randomness. XD

[eliasok]

hello everyone! i apologize for the late arrival, spring break got me exhausted. i’m playing both elias and dallas, and i can’t wait to y’all to rp / plot against them :~) 

zayn malik + agender + he/they — have you met elias moore? they are a twenty-four year old freelance web designer known as the optimist. an asexual pisces, they are venturesome + effervescent, as well as hypersensitive + gullible. their soulmark is a wilted rose on the nape of their neck, and they can feel the emotions of their soulmate, who happens to look like jennie kim. // china. 19. she/they. est. // statistics

background & personality

since a very young age, elias had been raised by two mothers in the states. it wasn’t until he turned the age of two that he was officially adopted in their relatively new family since his birth parents didn’t have much money to raise him in pakistan, and wanted him to have a better life than they did, with people they knew would love a child as if it was their own.

the three moved around quite a bit throughout his childhood, mostly due to his mother’s job as a journalist, but they ended up staying in las vegas once elias got into middle school. it was during the summer before seventh grade was when the family fostered, then eventually adopted, his younger brother, winter.

despite many attempts, he was unable to develop many long-term friendships growing up, being constantly seen as this new kid with hippie parents that liked everything and everyone yet he didn’t fit into the mold of any of the existing cliques.

that caused elias to spend most of time with himself, reading sci-fi novels, discovering and sometimes creating ideas for new video games or off working as a babysitter for the neighbors.

once he was older and able to escape his lonely teenage years, elias has an easier time making friends and is able to accept himself for who he is – as someone who’s unique, and not caring what others think of him anymore; or at least, not as much as he used to.

and who he is is someone who likes to cut their hair in odd fashions (( it’s currently like THIS )), paint their nails, wear space related clothing (( socks included )), read fantasy / mystery books, watch anything that’s about zombies / the undead, and care a little too much about animals + the environment.

he’s super nice (( almost too nice )) with everyone and always wanting to help especially with strangers, although that sometimes backfires, since he enjoys giving more than receiving and highkey fears being alone at times.

do not confuse his kindness with weakness – he’ll let you know when he feels like he’s being mistreated and it won’t be pretty. there might be some tears involved.

elias is also sensitive, like really sensitive, which could be obvious upon first impression, as in almost anything could be taken the wrong way with him.

as well as sensitive, elias is extremely persistent. he won’t stop at nothing until he gets the answer / result he wants.

he’d even do whatever it takes to make people like him (( without changing himself or his values ofc )) or else he won’t be able to sleep at night knowing he’s disliked by anyone.

while having not a good experience in high school, elias went off to college, eager for knowledge and living in the city of ny, and hopefully make new friendships / relationships.

he’s finished studying game development at a pricey college in florida, desiring to create his own video games one day.  he was popular due to his likable personality and since he always wanted to travel around the world, he studied aboard two years after being a freshman.

after graduation he wanted to explore other parts of the world, flying to paris, new zealand, japan -- then he found himself in captiva and freelancing from the island for the past year.

elias loves love and the idea of having a soulmate so he sure once him and his soulmate connect, it’ll be instant fireworks.

he likes to eat a lot, don’t know why this fact is relevant, but i think it’s good to point out since he’s going to be trying a lot of french food and making himself sick.

do any of these make sense anymore or??? i don’t think they do at this point i’m so tired.

but hey to finish things off, here’s a cool lil THING i found that describes elias perfectly:

outward: very mature, compassionate, loving, sensitive to the energies around them, instinctive with other people’s emotions, thoughtful with conversation and advice, receptive, gentle, always appearing as an older wiser soul despite actual age. inward: daydreamers, extremely reliant on gut instinct and uncanny abilities for prediction, idealistic, emotional, very intelligent, interested in culture, hypersensitive and will often absorb negative energy, observant to the point of feeling isolated or disconnected.

wanted connections

roommates — elias shares a place with one or two roommates. he tries hard to befriend them but he probably just annoys the heck out of them. it’s currently open as a wc on the main!

drinking buddies — elias is such a lightweight and definitely needs a friend to monitor him / join in on the fun.

past flings or exes

old friends that drifted apart

close friends

online romance / friendship

enemies

someone elias is crushing on ..

client for his freelance web designing

etc .. etc ..

[achublesumi]

Gay Pride Month 2018: I am Fluxsexual

So, I've decided to write about my pride, but not the boastful "Oh I'm perfect," pride. I'm talking gay shit. I don't know if that's really any better, but, honestly, it's one of the bigger facets of my being. I had always been gay and trans. Some of the earliest memories was me dressing as a boy, trying to pee standing up. They are memories I smile at and remember fondly, though I also have the scary, anxious memories as most of us LGBTQI people do. Remembering things like having my mom tell me I need to get a training bra (it literally wrecked my world because I had always seen myself as more masculine). Having to come out over and over again every time I found out something new about myself. That's always nerve-wracking.

So, I'm coming out again. Or, at least, explaining my seemingly complicated sexuality and gender. Do I need to? No, but I want people to understand me. I want to be open to those that have inquiring minds, or even harsh words. I want ignorant people to read this and scream at their god about how sinful I am. At least they now have some knowledge of our struggles as a community, even if they act like they don't. The main point is, this is for me. I don't care what others have to say or what they think. This is me. This is for those that wish to get to know me and to scare off those that thought they did. I don't need negative people who can't accept my fluctuating self. I am a creature of the universe and I will forever keep changing and growing. Get over it. #sorrynotsorry

I'm water, okay.

My gender and sexuality have changed many times. I started as a "straight", unknowingly-trans-cis female who didn't even really believe gay people existed. (Long story short, I had a very religious sperm donor who preached the words of his god and said how bad gay people where.) As I went through elementary school awkwardly I had a bad experience with a cis-male person. (I will need to write about it another time.) It left me fearing cis-male persons (and maybe even others). Though I didn't realize this fear until I was in high school. So, not knowing it was fear I chalked it up to hating men. Which I gave into. I would say things like, "All men are terrible/mean/gross/other means adjectives." I then just started saying I was a lesbian, cis-female throughout most of my high school years. I dated a female friend of mine eighth grade year, though our relationship was secret except to friends. People still somehow heard or assumed and picked fun at us. It was difficult. That was the first time I came out to my mom too. It was a very anxiety filled build up only to be told, "That's nice." I believe I eventually told her I was lesbian, but she would always tell me to, "Do whatever made me happy." I had also met my first actual gay person in seventh grade. At the time, she was a lesbian and talked about her girlfriend. I believe that got the wheels turning for me.

My freshman year of high school I was more "out". I would wear rainbows, but I was still a little nervous when others asked me about it. I had wanted to join my school's GSA, but was too nervous about it at the time. I also had a "boyfriend", but I never saw him because of the fear I was hiding. I avoided him like the plague and any guy that said they liked me. I would purposefully take a longer route to get to class to avoid any guys in that category. Eventually, though, I had to go to the library with a friend. He was there. My heart and mind started racing, I started sweating. I froze as he came towards me and wrapped his arms around me. I was like a scared rabbit or deer. If you had felt or heard my heart, you would have thought it was going to explode. He tilted my head up and kissed me, but all I did was freak out more. I buried my head in his chest and wrapped my arms in a vice like grip around him. I was internally freaking out. I literally didn't know what to do. Typing this now and remembering is giving me the same panicked feelings. Luckily, my friend must have noticed or felt how freaked out I was and grabbed me from him to drag me somewhere else. My savior. I don't know what happened to him, but I never saw him again after that.

I started going to anime conventions a lot with a friend as well and meeting people through that. I started dating a girl we had met at one of those events. She was nice, but lived in Phoenix. And had a boyfriend. She had, of course, cleared me with him first, so that was fine. I didn't mind at all. My first experience with an open relationship. That ended with her cheating, of course. We did try again after, but ended it about a month in. Distance is a killer for me. I also dated that same friend from before (my savior), though, looking back, I feel she is more asexual/aromatic. We broke up soon after dating.

I was a band geek as well, but only sophomore and junior years. Being in band is much like being in a really weird, sexually charged family. Especially with so many of us going through puberty and trying to find ourselves. A few guys in the band liked me, but I eventually became relaxed with it. They didn't do anything unless I told them it was okay. But I was still "lesbian". I had a couple weird experiences with guys through out my high school years, but I brushed them off as flings. I never had sex (and didn't until after I graduated HS). I also dated quite a few more females. Most, again, cheated on me. Sigh.

Through the Gay Straight Alliance club I was president of from sophomore to senior year, I was introduced to the Gay Lesbian Education Network (GLSEN) who would organize a little seminar for GSA's in Tucson. That was where I found the terms genderqueer and genderfluid. I feel I still embody both of those terms. I have feminine and masculine qualities, but I am also fluid through all sorts of genders. They also had meetings in Tucson to plan things like that and our GSA would go often and try and participate the best we could. I was also able to go to a retreat they put on up in NY right outside of NYC. It was a wonderful experience. It was where I had met my first trans people that were looking to transition. It was very eye opening. Hearing their stories started stirring something in my brain. This was the summer before senior year and I was 17 years old.

Though I had come to accept myself as gender queer/fluid, I had never really thought of myself as trans. I think it's because I really only thought of transsexual, as most people do. The night before we were supposed to leave, I had a break down. I sat outside on some grass and just started crying as realization set in. I had always been trans and I could actually see myself transitioning into a male. I don't think I was sad or scared from that, I was just sad because it had been repressed for so long. That, and the fear I had tried so hard to push down came bubbling up. I didn't hate men, I feared them. That ended up helping me define my sexuality as pansexual. I was able to go as Addem the next day as well as use male pronouns. It was so refreshing and felt nice. During senior year, my friends called me male and Addem sometimes. I was even marked absent one time because I was dressed and looked so masculine a substitute teacher would not accept me as who I was! I came out to my mom as well. She took me to a department store and bought me all kinds of male clothing. It was a better response than I could have asked for. Though everyone did not respect my pronouns and what not, I was still just happy. Sure, I had some kids make fun of me throughout my high school career, but kids are just dicks in general.

As an adult, I've also fluctuated. I had sex with a male at 19. We dated for almost 5 years and were even engaged. Though I had always wanted to have sex with a girl first, I was fine with the experience. I had told him I was into open relationships and he didn't seem opposed (when he actually was). I had met a few girls off of Craigslist (yes, I was one of those). We didn't really do much but hang out a few times, but it was still nice. Eventually, my fiance invited another female out for a night of drinking and sex with my first girl happened. She was ideal physically, though she really was not there to be my partner. She wanted just A as a partner, so we ended the relationship. Though she was the one that introduced me to FetLife. I was also on antidepressant/anxiety meds and put myself on Depoprovera shots. My sexual urges took a nose dive. Besides that point, A making me feel gross as a female and never respecting my gender identity. We didn't have sex often and I guess that made him feel I didn't love him? Thanks for the talk...

I got a coworker of mine into FetLife and going to meets. We played with her a few times and she expressed she was interested in being in a relationship with us. There was a couple of others we were in a temporary relationship with that ended soon after we started dating her. We'll call her AB. She had lied the whole time and just wanted A, to no surprise. What was surprising is how they cheated (there's a writing about them somewhere).

Now, my current partner(s), one of which is my spouse (@ekelarsons). Arson is an amazing human being and has helped me grow and express many of my suppressed dimensions. I'm able to say no without feeling bad. I am allowed to dress masculine and be called male pronouns. He uses my preferred pronouns which are "They/Them". It's beautiful.

Now, the point! I am water. I am forever fluctuating, flowing, bending, changing. "My sexuality is as fluid as my gender." is always something I like to say. I go from being hypersexual one week/day/minute to being completely asexual the next. I prefer female bodied partners, but have never been with a MTF person nor a FTM. Cis-males (and maybe FTM?) still scare me to no end, though I am sometimes sexually attracted to them (though older men scare me most, probably because I relate them to my sperm donor). I am usually demisexual with men, but sometimes I just want asexual relationship with one. I am usually highly sexually attracted to most female bodied people, but I get scared or nervous when being sexual with them (though I have had sex with women more than men). I also do this thing where I tell people I have a crush on them so if nothing can happen, I get over the feelings more quickly. I am an enigma. I am complex. My sexuality, gender, and attraction fluxes.

I am gender queer/fluid. I am fluxsexual. I am coming out once again with this term I was trying to make up, but also see others using on the internet. It fits since omnisexual is actually differently defined than what I was using it as.

Thanks for reading. :)

[raeyvies]

Hello ^^ I'd like to request an "RFA+V+Saeran react to an asexual MC" headcanon. Thank you~❤

RFA + V + Saeran reacting to finding out about MC’s asexuality

I will be completely honest, I’m not well versed in asexuality so I had to look up what it specifically meant so I did my best to portray MC that way. I went by the dictionary definition that someone asexual “lacks interest or desire in sex, essentially neutral; however, it does not mean celibacy. People who identify as asexual may have sex to pleasure a partner who is sexual or if they have a desire to have children.” Also MC doesn’t have a happy ending with all of them to make it more realistic ^^;; I hope you enjoy and thank you for requesting from me :D 

Yoosung:

Your asexuality didn’t really affect your relationship with Yoosung

Then again the both of you were young and let’s be real, he plays games so much he was distracted enough from well any sexual desires

The two of you complimented each other in this way until one day he brought up the topic while you two were out walking your dog

Yoosung was curious all of a sudden about your sexuality. Of course he was respectful about it

He’s a cinnamon roll and the last thing he wanted to do was hurt you by saying things he shouldn’t

As he wasn’t asexual, he only wanted to know what it was like if you could at least explain it to him

He only wanted to know how you felt in this relationship all this time knowing that there was that one detail that the two of you didn’t share

“Ah well. In high school, a lot of girls always bragged about their sex life and I just didn’t see what was so great about sex. A lot of my friends always said I didn’t know what I was missing out on so hey why not give it a go. Hooked up with my boyfriend at the time. God I still feel bad for him I think I broke his ego. And boom boom that confirmed I was asexual. Absolutely no interest in sex”

Hearing your story, he felt that he was getting closer to you even after having dated over a year.

You continued, “on top of it all, I never obsessed over idols like my friends. I still never got why they always said that they wanted to do the do with all the popular idols. Of course I liked those idols too but I never saw them as sex icons. And as for you, just because I’m not attracted to you in the sexual way, doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

Those last few words made his heart flutter a little bit

He felt good on the inside knowing that it was other things about him that attracted you

But still he couldn’t believe you lost your virginity in high school when you were sixteen.

He’s too pure to handle.

He’s still a virgin by the time he graduates college because he remained with you all that time

He respected your lack of sexual desire and never pushed you or crossed the line

You had a little pity and let him lose his virginity with you. You had sex with him for the sake of him at least having the experience but you never mentioned that you felt absolutely neutral while at it.

Jumin:

You kept your asexuality a secret from Jumin because you felt it wasn’t yet the time to tell him

You honestly weren’t sure how he would react but as long as he didn’t try to have sex with you, you felt no need to discuss it with him.

However, one day Jumin was hella stressed at work and called to see if you wanted to come up to his office.

You saw nothing wrong with it. You’d been to his office dozens of times anyway.

When you reached his office, he pulled you into an embrace and sighed in relief

He was so happy to see you and all he wanted was to be relieved of his stress.

Since he couldn’t really leave work because he had a meeting soon he thought you two could do it for the first time in his office

The idea of it turned him on so much and well, as much of a romantic as he was, he didn’t want the first time to be cheesy either.

He started to kiss your neck and run his hands down your waist and hips

All you could do was remain there unsure of what to do. It was just purely awkward for you since you had no interest in partaking in this

But you honestly couldn’t bring yourself to tell him you didn’t want to do it either

Thank god jaehee walked in through the door and rained on Jumins plans.

Jaehee ex machina.

You awkwardly shuffled out of the office, kissing Jumin goodbye, and thinking to yourself that you had to tell him

Jumin was so confused as to why you said goodbye so fast but he was more confused as to why you were avoiding him so much

Anytime he was close, you would bolt away

It wasn’t until one day he caught you and asked what was going on. He asked if he’d done something

And well you were left with no choice but to confess you didn’t want to have sex with him and that you had no desires for sexual adventures

Jumin tried to process it but he was more bothered that you hadn’t told him ever since the beginning

He was worried about not being able to start a family but you quickly told him that you were willing to have sex to have a child.

Jumin tried to convince himself that this relationship would work.

He was the passionate kind of lover

He yearned for intimacy over and over

But all you wanted was romance yet that still made no sense to him. How could you want romance without sex?

But as much as he wanted to respect your decision, he was human and he needed release.

It wasn’t enough pleasuring himself alone

If anything the both of you were failing to maintain a healthy relationship

Unfortunately your asexuality was not compatible with him

And one day you went to visit your husband to give him some wine that you bought at a local vineyard to make it up to him

But you found him in the midst of quenching his thirst for sexual intercourse in his own office with the daughter of another conglomerate chairman

You knew it. You weren’t enough for him and he would never accept you for the way you were.

The two of you attempted marriage counseling to see if you could both reach a compromise and move on past Jumin’s unfaithfulness. But 2 months later you figured there was no progress between the two of you anymore

A few days later you handed him the divorce papers and silently went on your way to live on your own once again.

What else were you going to expect when you married Jumin after 11 days?

Jaehee:

The two of you were at Jaehee’s apartment watching movies to pass the time

You cuddled under a blanket with her as you watched a variety of films from action to thrillers, from romantic comedies to erotica.

A little issue arose when you were watching a heated movie. Since you were laying your head on her chest, you felt her heart beat race all of a sudden

You could tell she was having a reaction to the movie but you weren’t sure what to do

After the movie, Jaehee was still a bit heated herself.

While you went to the bathroom, she drank some water before joining you in the bathroom.

You were cleaning your face when she back hugged you but not for cute intentions

She whispered in your ears some NSFW things but you didn’t really respond to them making you feel guilty.

She pulled away from you and embarrassed, she said “oh my god I probably look desperate right now. Don’t I?”

You dried up you face real quick and gave her an innocent kiss. You tell her it’s just you.

Casually you mention that you’re asexual so it’s not her fault that you’re not really fazed by her naughty attempts.

Shes literally so understanding. She apologizes any time she can for making your relationship with her awkward all of a sudden

But you both put effort in to get past this and find solutions for you two.

Sometimes she feels guilty for making you feel burdened but you tell her that everything is fine.

Sometimes you even joke that you don’t find Zen sexually attractive to which Jaehee would jokingly gasp.

One day she just had a sudden urge but she would never ever suggest for you to do something that made you uncomfortable

And well in the bathroom she took care of herself but you were worried that she was taking so long in there so you went to check on her

You heard her moaning and whining and you knew exactly what was going on in there.

You felt guilty but you didn’t want to put her through an awkward sexual relation.

But the two of you were still ever in love and that hardly changed. Sure the both of you made some compromises

And that only strengthen the bond between you two.

Zen:  (Forgive me but this one won’t be a happy ending and some things he says in this headcanon might be offensive to some of you. Sorry beforehand if you are offended, it’s not my intention, it’s just to be realistic)

You honestly felt so guilty all this time. Despite being asexual, you and Zen had into intimate moments more than you’d prefer

He knew nothing because you always acted as though you wanted to have sex too for his sake

You’d always been used to conceding to others in the past so at this point you just swallowed your asexuality for Zen’s sake

But at one point you just couldn’t handle it anymore. You felt so awkward when you two did it and you subtly came to reject him every time.

At first, Zen thought you were just tired or not really in the mood but after a while it was kind of hurting his pride

He waited and waited for you to tell him if he did something wrong if he’s been rough with you

The moment you told him you’re asexual he just raises an eyebrow

“Wait doesn’t that mean you won’t have sex?”

“Zen, asexuality doesn’t mean celibacy…”

“Then what do you mean you’re asexual?? Did something happen to you?”

You actually didn’t think he wouldn’t be like this. It’s like he actually didn’t understand.

And in all honesty, he really didn’t understand.

“Well you’ve had sex with me, doesn’t that mean you’re not?”

You tried all that you could to not snap at him. This was actually really offensive to you. Just because you had sex with him doesn’t mean that you’re not asexual

“No. Being asexual isn’t a lifestyle. It’s just how I am.”

“For god’s sake, then tell me what it is. You’re not making any sense to me. I don’t know anything about asexuality as you put it.”

He was raising his voice at this point. This was a new part of him you never saw coming.

Not to be easily offended, but you truly felt hurt that he kept denying that you were asexual. He just couldn’t put two and two together to figure out you were asexual yet had sex

You even enjoyed it. You never protested until now and he could only assume that you were hurt or something along those lines

This time it was your turn to snap at him

“JUST BECAUSE I’VE HAD SEX WITH YOU DOESN’T MEAN I’M NOT ASEXUAL. READ A GODDAMN BOOK OR WIKIPEDIA AT LEAST. IT MEANS THAT I’M NEUTRAL TO SEX. I’VE ONLY PRETENDED TO LIKE IT FOR YOUR SAKE BUT I CAN’T KEEP LYING TO MYSELF.”

He felt lied to. If you hadn’t told him before you two became a couple, before you had your first time with him, he could only assume that it was a phase out of the blue.

“Listen, MC, if this is just a phase, I’ll just wait for it to blow over. I don’t know what’s gotten into you–”

“You know what, I’m done. You can kiss my ass goodbye. Jumin was right, you’re fucking narcissistic. My sexuality shouldn’t have to revolve around you.”

And when you left, Zen was angry at himself. He beat himself up every night and attempted to talk to you but your words rang in his ears for weeks

Narcissist.

Seven:

Seven was always curious as to why you always stayed up later than him on your computer

You always said that it was for work or something related

After all it made sense because you were an author

One night you were on your laptop typing when you fell asleep in the middle of it with your finger stuck on the shift key so it started making noises

Seven took the liberty of removing your hands from your laptop so you could sleep

He wasn’t going to read it because he respected your privacy but hey curiosity killed the cat

He took note that it was actually a side blog different from your main blog for fans

And you were under a pseudonym

Seven thought your pseudonym was very fitting

You shared your experiences with your followers and then seven started to note that all your blog entries had one thing in common

It was about your relationship with Seven and your asexuality

That’s how he found out about it

He spent the night reading your blog from his phone and he finally learned about your innermost thoughts

He read about your fears in your relationship and your uncertainties if a time ever came where you would have to tell Seven about your sexuality.

But he also realized that despite that one small detail, you were extremely happy with him and he couldn’t help but smile and feel so accomplished

He always thought that he was a hard pill to swallow so he was so unsure if you’d stay with him a long time

I have a boyfriend and his name is Seven. Not his real name but that’s his pseudonym just like I have one. He is the best thing that has ever happened to me even though we haven’t been together for a long time. We’ve only been together for about nine months and I’ve moved in with him a few months ago.

As you guys know I’m asexual so you’re probably wondering if he knows and let me tell you, he doesn’t. It hasn’t come up and well we haven’t had sexual relations yet. Quite honestly I’m scared to tell him and I wouldn’t know what’ll happen to us. He’s so sweet and goofy. He’s good for me and I’ve never met someone like that. I feel that he’ll accept me for who I am despite my sexuality. I’ll keep you guys posted on our relationship.

“I’ll still accept you, MC” he whispered so you wouldn’t wake up

That night he only thought of how to confront you about what he read. He didn’t want you to believe he was prying but he wanted to lift a weight off your shoulders

The next morning, he woke up first and decided to open your blog on your computer, and write an entry from his perspective

Hello everyone, this is Seven, Defender of Justice and Six’s amazing, goofy, honey buddha chip loving boyfriend. I just came across this blog last night while Six fell asleep. You guys should’ve seen her, she literally fell asleep while sitting in bed typing. Don’t worry I made sure that she slept normally. She has no idea I’m writing this as she sleeps but I’m hoping she reads this before coming out to eat breakfast :D I only now found out about Six’s asexuality. I want you guys to know that I love her either way, and I will stay with her for as long as we can. She’s the best thing to have ever come into my life and I won’t let her go over one little detail.

This has been Six’s boyfriend, follow me on instagram @707buddha_chips and no, don’t ask me for Six’s real name. Over and out /o/

V/Jihyun:

With V, you felt you could be completely open

He always filled you with reassurance that he wouldn’t judge you or leave you for small reasons

So one day you two were doing a photoshoot, you as his model of course

He thought to make a more intimate collection of photos since all the others had been of innocent relationships and romance

Of course you didn’t think much about as you posed in a semi-translucent white nightgown

V thought you were absolutely beautiful as you posed on a bed with ruffled white sheets and sun looming in through the windows

After shooting well over 150 photos, he finished.

You were a little embarrassed because you actually fell asleep toward the end.

V had actually woken you up for the shoot because he wanted to capture the morning sun’s rays

So at least the last fifteen photos were of you sleeping but they were perfect in V’s eyes

He got back into bed with you and pulled you closer him, having you nuzzled in his chest

He loved you so much and stroked your hair, whispering sweet nothings

You heard them all and you couldn’t help smile. To others, it would be considered sweet nothings but to you they were sweet everythings

You couldn’t get enough of them

You pulled back a bit from him to look at him and thought this was the right moment to tell him about your asexuality

V was a bit surprised at first but since the both of you had never had sex, he didn’t think too much about

Just like you, he was more of a romantic and companionate lover. He didn’t think sex was a vital part of relationships though, he didn’t identify as asexual

He gave you unconditional love (of the healthy kind. Not like what he gave to Rika)

Then he heard you sniffling a bit and he was so concerned. He hadn’t said anything wrong right?

You confessed that you were so touched by his sweet words and that he accepted you for who you were

“No one’s really accepted me for being like this. They’ve never understood but you… thank you for coming into my life”

“MC, I will always understand. I’ll be who you want me to be. I love you too much and I will never leave you for a moment. I’ll never be like others.”

After that confession, he thought of ways he could interpret your sexuality in photos.

It was something so unique, and he wanted to let others know that you were both happy with each other and that this is nothing to be thought of as an obstacle in a relationship

If you love someone, you stay with them. Period.

You gave him an idea to take pictures of the both of you like this in bed

He thought it was a good idea as it showed that just because you were in bed did not mean you had to have sexual relations. That it was not the only purpose for a bed

He set the camera on a tripod, angling various times to get the best shots of your love for him and his for you

And just like you, he fell asleep in the middle of shooting and the last photo caught the two of you purely in love

This is what romance is to us.

Saeran

The both of you identified as asexual

Saeran never really had room for thoughts on sexual relations considering how his childhood and adolescence played out.

So just like you, he was neutral about sex. It was just something people did but he never found anyone attractive in that way

Saeran was pulled to you because of who you were and he only had an interest in an (extremely) romantic and affectionate relationship with you

He was anxious to tell you he never had an interest in sex but he didn’t know the term for it (this child is too pure)

“Oh you’re asexual too? Well that’s one less awkward conversation to get through”

You were surprised when he told you all that, but also relieved that someone understood and you didn’t have to justify yourself for being, well, you.

Saeran was actually really glad to finally put a name to his identity. Can’t blame him, he wasn’t well versed in anything LGBTQ+ cuz he had so many other things to think about anyway.

“So that’s what it’s called? Then yes I’m asexual. Wait hold on… You too?”

You nodded with a smile.

“No wonder we clicked from the start, love.”

Having now settled that matter, the two of you became closer. And well really romantic too

Every day you’d both do cringey adorable couple things but neither of you were tired of it

Flowers everywhere. Innocent kisses everywhere too

Cheesy romantic comedies and horror films

The horror films were Saeran’s idea

HE literally just wanted to comfort you when you got scared

What a darling. Such a boo

Then one day you just said of the blue

“Wanna try it? You know, sex? Like to see what’s so great about it since everyone’s like sex is amazing”

He just shrugged and was like sure okay. Pretty much what you would expect from saeran anyway

And well the two of you did it. It was soooo awkward someone please save you two

This kid is literally

Senpai in the streets ψ(｀∇´)ψ

Kawaii in the Sheets™ (*˘︶˘*)

You were laying there right next to him catching your breath

“Wow,” you said at first before breaking into laughter. “I still don’t get it. There’s nothing special about sex (laughs).”

“Lets just agree to not do that again alright” Saeran was just like you

All you two can say now is that you’ve at least checked sex of the things to do and never do again

And well Saeran made sure to stay as cringey as ever

You still loved it so much (๑・v・๑)

[sableaire]

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I really look up to you for considering everyone's opinion and being calm and level-headed. I feel like I don't see a lot of toxic, passive-aggressive Tumblr stuff here. It's a breath of fresh air imo. I was just wondering how you do it? Like, what do you tell yourself, when you feel angry about someone else's opinion, but want to remind yourself that they're entitled to it? It would really help me! Thank you.

Hello - thank you for your kind words, Anon. I try hard to try and make my blog a comfortable place for the most amount of people, and though I sometimes feel like I slip up, I’m glad that you find my blog something refreshing.

I can’t really say how it is that I avoid the toxic, Tumblr passive-aggression. Part of it may just be that I avoid it myself, so it never ends up on my dash. However, thinking on it now, I guess a lot of that is a deliberate choice as well.

Something that gives me a lot of perspective on things like this is that I’ve changed a lot as a person in just the last six years. The transition from high school to college to now near-graduation was a significant one, and I underwent a lot of personal growth.

As such, I know what it’s like to make mistakes as a teenager (or younger). I know who I was, how I thought, and I know what would have worked on me and what would not have. 

This post has gotten super-long, possibly my longest yet(?) so I’ll put it under the cut as usual. If you want to just skim the example given and go straight to tips, skip down to the bolded portion, ahaha. More under the cut:

Just a warning, but this example contains mentions of homophobia and, additionally, some highly negative or dangerously neutral opinions that I personally held in the past. I no longer retain such beliefs. I ask that you look upon this example as a story of growth, as I do. 

For example, as a young teen, I had a very firm belief (not taught, just a personal belief that came out of nowhere;;) that anything sexual was bad, and I was more morally pure for having no interest in it. Additionally, I was raised in a highly homophobic environment, and because I had no concept of romantic/sexual attraction in the first place, I had no reason to really think about the idea of why loving the same gender would be bad. I just accepted it as a fact of life, just as I accepted it as a fact of life that eventually I would fall in love and marry a man, etc.

It was to the point where I kind of just… didn’t realize gay people existed. Hell, I didn’t even know there was gay media. I was just straight-up oblivious. But that fun fact aside, my complete disconnect from the existence of gay people meant that, if the topic came up, I probably would have made some highly ignorant comments.

((Side note, I barely realized heterosexual people existed - I didn’t realize that people were having sex in my high school until I was a senior!))

At the same time, I was a highly prideful individual. I know for a fact that if someone, especially some stranger I don’t know, confronted me in anger, calling me homophobic and a terrible person for some of the things I blithely said, young-teen-me would have drawn myself up to save face. I would have gotten offended, angry, and discredited whoever it was. After all, why would I believe some internet stranger over my environment - over myself and my experiences?

If someone had attacked me for my ignorance and these beliefs born of complete ignorance, I know for a fact that I would have ended up more firmly aligning myself with those beliefs. I would have felt the need to stand my ground, partially to protect my self-esteem, partially because as someone who looked down on emotion (I could write a book on my past self;;), I would not have wanted to be associated with a group of people that were so angry. 

So, now that I am older and have moved beyond that, now that I know better, I approach these kind of issues in a way that I know my past self would have been more receptive to. I don’t get angry, and I don’t try to enforce my own ideas on other people. Instead, I offer more information. I trust the other party to be a strong thinker in their own right, and then I offer them a choice that might not have been available to them before.

As a young teen, I had no option to accept gay people, when I had no concept of their existence and the vague ‘fact’ that it was a ‘dirty’ or ‘sinful’ thing to be gay. I had no option to accept the idea that people should be able to love who they love when my belief on romantic love was that you just choose the best option available to you once you’re ready to marry (aroace, woo, fun times).

But I was a headstrong teenager, overconfident and smart enough to sound impressive, so if anyone attacked my character or intelligence over my homophobia, I would have felt the need to assert my autonomy over myself. Telling me what to think? Telling me how to behave? That would have been unconscionable. My indignation and anger would have kept me from ever trying to learn more about the topic.

If, instead, someone gave me an option - just made the topic of being gay something more normalized in my life, gave me more historic sources (either of cultures where same-sex relationships were accepted or records of the horrors the LGBTQ community suffered), and just gave me more information to reform my beliefs on my own, I would have been more likely to change my views.

Looking back now, that’s exactly what happened. The way it happened, however, is also something a lot of people might not have agreed with. What brought the concept of ‘gay people’ into my sphere of awareness was in fact a friend’s interest in BL content. My desire to support and share in her interests, along with a natural curiosity and interest in storytelling, led me to read a number of BL manga. I never got into the BL community because I didn’t experience it the same way they did - as a sex-repulsed asexual, I wasn’t reading it for sexual gratification, so I couldn’t relate to their titillation. Even so, because I never do things by halves, as a teenager, I continue reading BL as a hobby.

Some, of course, was blatant fetishization, and I am now embarrassed that I have ever read those. Actually, I’m embarrassed about this period in my life in general, for various reasons, but I’m sharing the story! Just for you, Anon! 

In any case, some was blatant fetishization, but I did also encounter some actually well-written stories with emotional stake. Now, I’m not saying this is in any way ideal, but it was these stories that exposed me to the idea of social rejection, fear of being disowned, etc. due to homophobia. 

These particular themes struck a chord with me, because even though I had just accepted the idea that I was going to marry someone and have children, etc. I also had a vague awareness that I didn’t want to. In Korean society, and with my grandmother, I did have an ingrained fear that I may be somehow rejected by my family should I ever not want to go to any of my grandmother’s blind dates for me and such. 

Sometimes in high school, when I answered that I didn’t have an interest in dating, family members would accuse me of being a lesbian in a tone of near disgust. Prior to reading the BL stories, I likely would have been offended by the accusation. After reading the BL stories and reading about situations where people got cut off for being gay, I was more hurt by the idea that if I was actually gay myself, I likely would have been rejected. It better helped me to better understand and empathize with some struggles that LGBTQ persons may go through in their lives.

This empathy led me to be more open to reading about the LGBTQ community, and it helped me to better control my surprise when I found out some of my friends were bisexual or had kissed girls, and it was a gateway to more information, with which I have shaped my current beliefs and moral code.

This is another reason that I don’t really engage in Tumblr’s moral crusades. I’m of the firm belief that people grow given the chance, and that growth is shaped by three things: information, support, and choice. In this example, my ‘information’ came from places that the more morally aggressive side of Tumblr would consider irredeemable: BL media. 

I’ve written a post or two on the topic in the past, so my followers already know that I disapprove of the fetishization often inherent in this kind of media. However, I simultaneously cannot bring myself to bring myself to just tell people, “Hey, you shouldn’t read BL,” because it would not have worked on me, personally, and also because my experience reading BL actually contributed to the who I am in present day.

Let’s create an Alternate Universe - remove this source of ‘information’ from my formative years. I had no opportunity to empathize with an example of emotional rejection. Due to living in South Korea with a limited social circle, attending a Christian school, I have limited opportunity to meet actual gay people. Instead, as I grow up, my increasingly evident disinterest in guys leads to more disgusted/concerned accusations from family members that I’m a lesbian, which I react to poorly because I am both repulsed by the idea of a romantic relationship and also because I have been told all my life that being gay is something undesirable.

I eventually make a homophobic comment, because I start to associate the concept ‘lesbian’ with my personal revulsion. In response, someone calls me a terrible person, irredeemable, etc. and challenges my moral character, something AU me has a high opinion of. Insulted, I feel the need to defend my position because, psychologically, it is easier to decide that other people are wrong than admit that I am wrong.

The new ‘information’ available to me is that people who support gay people are ‘overly-emotional’ and will attack a person’s character without knowing who they are. Perhaps I receive a death threat or they tell me that people like me are better off dead. Then the new ‘information’ available to me is that people who support gay people are potentially dangerous.

As an upset teenager, in this AU, I speak to my family about this. Due to some ingrained homophobic beliefs themselves, they validate my experience. Some of them might tell me that people who support gay people are “just as bad as gays themselves.” My mother, especially, is furious about the death threat. She tells me that I’m smarter than they’ll ever be, how dare some stranger say that. Is it possible to report them to the police? I tell her, no, that’s not possible, mom, it’s the internet and also they’re probably in a different country.

This is AU me’s ‘support’. It reinforces the ‘information’ that I received, and it makes it more difficult for me to accept conflicting information in the future. Online, I may encounter other individuals who have received hate and or death threats for their homophobic beliefs, and I connect with them. We commiserate. This is more ‘support’ which makes it even harder for me to change my mind in the future.

And throughout this whole series of events, AU-me feels that she is in control of her own actions. She didn’t ‘give into’ the people trying to force her to change. She is proud of who she is, and she feels confident in her autonomy of herself. Due to basic psychology, she feels that her choice is the right one, and she instinctively seeks out biased evidence that confirms her beliefs.

Flash forward to AU age 22, I would be a completely different person to who I am today. I would not have the friends that I do. I would not be on Tumblr writing this post. My moral code and personal beliefs could be completely different.

So then, here’s a philosophical question: Does the very real possibility that I could have become an elitist, sexist homophobe make me a bad person?

There are some people who believe that people who are morally good will always end up where they are. I am not one of those people. I consider myself blessed that I met the people I did and had the experiences that I did. I am grateful that certain hardships in my life gave me time and reason to sit down and think about the kind of person that I want to be.

Due to the information that I was lucky enough to encounter and the support I was able to find, I was able to make the decision to commit to being an open-minded person. 

Of course, I recognize that my experience is unique to myself. It is very possible that someone else, in my aforementioned example, would have ended up homophobic in a different way - fetishizing gay people, applying BL fantasies to real life people, etc. - but in my case, that wasn’t so. And that’s the issue. You can’t accurately predict people’s trajectory of growth upon exposure to controversial topics and or media. However, it’s almost certainly guaranteed that anger and threats will be poorly received, and likely counter-productive. 

I believe that people are a product of their experiences. There have been a lot of kind people in my life, such as yourself Anon, who have told me that they respect my approach to situations or my philosophy on life or how I conduct myself, etc.

Ultimately, it is just that I am a product of my own unique set of experiences, and those experiences encompass both circumstances and mistakes. Upon coming to college and spending time away from my family, I really started committing to my self-betterment. I spent a lot of time thinking about my beliefs and the kind of person who I want to be. I took courses in Conflict Negotiation and Social Psychology because they were important to me. 

Right now, I am still learning, and I’m still trying. I’m really, really happy that I can be someone others find helpful for their own personal growth.

With that being said:

So, Anon, your question was, “I was just wondering how you do it? Like, what do you tell yourself, when you feel angry about someone else’s opinion, but want to remind yourself that they’re entitled to it?“

It’s not necessarily that I believe someone is entitled to their beliefs. There are some beliefs that I find dangerous, and I do not believe any person should have them. However, before I get angry, I think about my own experience as a person with less-than-stellar beliefs, and I think about what kind of approach would have best worked with me.

In my experience, the elements that contribute to a person’s opinions on something are the following: information, support, and choice.

So, things to keep in mind:

Every person uses the information available to them and the support system attached to that information to make, what they believe to be, an informed choice. People always believe in things and behave in a manner that makes logical sense to them, and that is important to remember.

Choice is the most important element of the three. The psychology of autonomy, especially in highly individualistic societies such as the United States, is incredibly powerful. Even if someone changes their behavior because someone else tells them to, they may later on start to resent both the behavior and the person that forced them. Ultimately, if you want someone to really change, you have to let them come to a different conclusion on their own. 

So, how do you change someone’s mind? Give them information and let them know that should they desire to change, they have your support. If someone is ignorant about something, rather than condemning them for it, it is most effective to present information in a neutral manner. Give them the option to learn, and let them choose the option for themselves. And, should they want to learn more about a certain perspective, offer your availability and aid. Allow them to make their own mistakes and learn from their own mistakes. Act as a guide they can choose to follow rather than trying to push them down a certain path. This is the approach Daryl Davis took towards the KKK, to great success.

That being said, I realize that this is a best case scenario. It is incredibly time-consuming, and it is for many people emotionally taxing. This method is not for everyone, and part of the reason I stick to it is because I recognize that I am one of few people who have the patience and the temperament to carry it out, and I believe that it is a necessary method in this world. However, I recognize that it is unfair to expect people with great emotional investment in a topic to just swallow their feelings and bear with it. Sometimes, certain topics are deeply upsetting to individual people. Especially in these cases, I recognize that it is highly difficult for people to take on such a goal-oriented approach. 

I am additionally committed to my approach because I know that there are some people who will be receptive to it, but not everyone can make use of it. As such, many people I know in my life ask for me to mediate conflicts or help them figure out how to change someone’s mind. I am an ally to many causes by being this more neutral, more open-minded person. I have received criticism for this before, that there’s no point trying to change bigots’ minds or that there’s no arguing with certain people. However, as someone who acknowledges that she could have become someone completely different (someone who thought poverty was the fault of the poor, that sexual assault is fault of the victim, that being gay was an abnormality, etc.) I know for a fact that people, especially younger people, can change their minds, given the opportunity.

However, like I said, this method is time-consuming and emotionally taxing. And as much as I want to help people, I also have an obligation to myself. So, part of the reason I avoid toxicity and passive-aggression or fan/anti debates is because I’m… I’m on Tumblr for fun. For a good time. Why would I willingly throw myself into more trouble when I can avoid it? The thing is, I already know that I can’t change everyone’s mind, so it doesn’t matter if I don’t go in and engage every single person on Tumblr whose opinions I disagree with. Instead, sometimes I’ll get Anons who ask my opinion on certain topics, and I can make a long post like this one. People interested in the topic will then read and reblog it, and it will eventually reach a wider audience. The thing about my approach is, I can’t please anyone on any one side. I have people who disagree with me on both sides… but, unlike other approaches, I also have people who agree with me on both sides. In any case, I’m on Tumblr for fun, and I don’t have a responsibility to anyone but my own followers.

That is also why I try to keep my Tumblr free of discourse, for the most part. Not everyone can handle emotionally charged controversy, and not everyone can easily ignore it if it just shows up on their dash. Although I try to tag everything so people can opt in and out of content, I also want my blog to be mostly a fun and friendly place for people where they can occasionally learn things. There are enough sources of stress in the world. I hope I’m never one of them. ((On occasion I will reblog a post which involves my political beliefs, but that is because I feel that, in this case, given the current US political climate, I would feel personally uncomfortable if I didn’t make my personal alignment known.))

Also, it’s important to note: If you’re engaging in dialogue and trying to change someone’s mind on a topic without thinking about how to succeed at it, at heart, changing their mind may not be your ultimate goal. Often times, a lot of Tumblr controversy comes, not from a place of wanting positive change, but wanting emotional gratification. Sending angry messages on the internet may feel good in the moment, but it often drags you into a frustrating argument that leads nowhere. It also will not have a long-term positive effect. Having the moral high ground in a situation can feel fantastic, and I’ve been there - but again, it doesn’t actually enact positive change. It just creates a survival-of-the-fittest environment for negativity. You’ll chase away the people who have room to grow, and only the loudest, most stubborn, most arrogant people will remain. 

Further, getting angry at people’s opinions on the internet creates an environment where it’s terrifying to make mistakes. On the internet, it’s impossible to tell someone’s age and or circumstances. A lot of people on Tumblr are kids, and they may or may not be lying about their ages to seem older. Think about parenting, and how criticizing small mistakes in behavior can lead to a long-term fear of making mistakes. Life is all about making mistakes and learning from them. Creating a system where one mistake can haunt you for the rest of your life is counter-productive to personal growth, and that’s what a lot of Tumblr controversy seems to be.

Actually, now that I’ve written all that, I just realized something I should have mentioned in the very beginning: I am not someone interested in changing the world. I’m not even interested in enacting social change. That’s far, far, far to broad a scope for me. There are some people built for such positions, and they seek to enter politics or start grassroot fundraisers, etc. I am not such a person.

Instead, I hope to become someone who can be a positive source of change for individuals. I don’t want to change the world or society, but I hope to be someone who can change one person’s worldview. An act of kindness for to a person who has lost hope. Someone who can translate languages and bridge cultures for individual people. Someone who can inspire someone to commit to their own self-development. 

To this day, I consider learning that I inspired someone to learn a new subject or pursue a new career path my greatest achievements. Few things delight me more.

I want to be a writer, and if the book that I publish can make a positive impact on just one reader, I will consider that book successful. That story would have been one worth telling.

There are some people who can make a goal to change the world and make it happen. I find that far too grand a dream for me. I lack the motivation for it, the strength of will for it, the vision for it. However, engaging with people one at a time, I can manage. So, there really is no reason for me to engage in Tumblr discourse. If someone comes to me directly, I can work with that. I can talk with someone one-on-one, and who knows, maybe I will come out the person changed. But that’s a personable scale, and it’s a level that I can comprehend.

I cannot change the world itself, but I can change the world for one person.

I don’t know if this was the answer you wanted, Anon, and I’m sorry it’s so long, ahaha. Ultimately, my advice to you is, decide what kind of person you want to be, and work towards it. This isn’t about achievements or careers, etc. - those are external things that label you. Who do you want to be? What kind of impact do you want to have on others? What kind of impression do you want to leave? And all the while, what role in life are you comfortable with on a physical, emotional, and ethical level?

After you figure that out, think about how you can become that person. The thing is, you never will, not completely, but you can improve yourself month by month and get a little closer, and every step closer to being that person is a victory. 

Most people in the world never take the time to think about it, so by taking the time to do so, Anon, you’ll already be a step ahead. 

..... I feel like after all that, I didn’t actually... answer the question very clearly. I’m sorry;; I hope you got something out of this ridiculous response, Anon;;;;

[dyscopian]

A Year on My Own

I’m terrible about blogging, or journal keeping in general. I’ve tried them all: previous tumblrs (agentslander which is now just a mess of SPN memes and gifs; the other is brendonurie, given to me by a friend years ago that kind of just turned into reblogging fan art because I feel obligated to post something when I have over 75k followers), word presses, bound books, composition notebooks and ugh, I wish that I could keep up with my bullet journal as well as I’d like, because I’m always coming across new spreads for it but I never stick to it.

It’s doubtful that this will be any different, but I’m into my third glass of wine and instead of working on any of my novels like I should be, I’m tinkering around with all the thoughts about my own life.

A blog has to start somewhere, and while I hope to use this more to run around with ideas for novels, character development and short stories, I also want to use it as a place to just work through my own thought processes.

My lease is almost up, which means it’s been almost a year now since I started out on this little venture that feels like true adulthood. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot over the last few weeks and just processing everything that’s happened in a year and what I’ve learned.

It’s funny how I have a ten year old daughter and had been married for several years but this last year has been the first year since 2008 that I’ve been on my own without living with roommates, friends, family or lovers. It’s given me a chance to really explore myself and find my identity in solitude. The last time I lived alone it was about finding my identity outside of my broken marriage, but this time around it’s had a more positive spin even if there’s been trials and tribulations.

I can sage my house without religious judgement, light incense and sit in a lowly lit room with a glass of wine or a bowl of weed and write, listen to music, read, mess around with tarot cards all while listening to music loudly or letting repeat episodes of Doctor Who play, or just enjoy the silence with the faint sound of my cat purring next to me or my chickens clucking around at my feet with their happy little trills.

That’s me, curled up on the couch watching documentaries on things that will kill in the Victorian home or watching Outlander and wishing the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who were real, because how awesome I think it would be to be sent back in time. I get to be weird and I get to be myself.

In the last year, I’ve graduated from college, learned how to take care of chickens of all things, found what I will and won’t tolerate in a job, friends and partner. I’ve met some of the most incredible people who have helped me discover things about myself. I’ve gotten out of a dead end relationship. I’ve learned the struggle of balancing bills on a low income, which has been a greater struggle than when I had been balancing them in a marriage.

I’ve been to a protest and experienced the rage of knowing the way the media twists events in favor of the system, in order to protect what’s broken rather than stand with the truth to fix it. I can stay out if I want to stay out and come home when I want without having to check in with someone.

These all seem like simple things and maybe I’m experiencing them later in life than a lot of other people but I met my ex husband when I was nineteen and from there never got to experience the independence that so many other people I know had before they settled down. And you never really know independence until you’re truly on your own.

I found out I can still break my own heart by falling for the wrong person. That may not seem like a beautiful thing, but it is. It’s been almost eight years since my divorce and nearly a decade since I let myself feel anything even close to relating to passion. People can’t hurt you if you don’t let them in and despite all my desires to let others in and trying my hand at a few relationships, I could never bring down my walls enough to give them any vulnerable part of me.

It threw me into this whole idea that I might be asexual, but I’m not. If anything, over the last year I’ve begun to embrace the fact that I am bisexual more than any other box that I might be shoved in and I’m standing up for that now, speaking louder about it rather than just shrugging it off and trying to figure out what’s so wrong with me that I can’t open up to the men that I thought I should be able to.

I chose relationships with people who I was better off being friends with and because of such the relationships lacked passion and chemistry because I tried to force myself to feel something that wasn’t there for me, like I was trying to fill a role I was supposed to fill;  but, I know now that I am fully capable of feeling passion and taking risks in being vulnerable. That, regardless of the circumstances that make it impossible for anything to develop, says I’m not as dead inside after my divorce as I thought I was after nearly a decade of being shut down towards others. Which is incredibly beautiful. It’s the latest lesson I’ve learned and I almost didn’t get that chance.

I tried to commit suicide back in July. I downed an entire prescription of Amitriptyline days before Chester Bennington committed suicide and ended up in the hospital two days after I took the pills. It wasn’t rational or thought out. I was just exhausted. Every paycheck coming short for rent and my other bills. Starving myself for days to make sure my child got fed and utilities stayed on. Unhappy and unheard in my relationship.

I had gotten into a fight with my psychiatrist the day of the overdose because I had gone off a medication that was interfering with the Amitriptyline I had been given for my migraines by the neurologist that she had recommended I see. She took me entirely off my anxiety meds because I wasn’t “compliant”, when those were the pills I needed more than the ones I had been told to go off of by the neurologist. It was just a catalyst after trying for over a year to work with her to get into TALK therapy, only to be thrown on all these medications that were making me sick and making my mental state worse.

Just a few months prior I had lost my circle of supposed friends over childish drama with some girls whose popularity on the internet trumped rational thought and whose mindset hadn’t moved past the he said she said of high school. After my overdose, I lost the last one in that circle because my attempt was inconvenient for her and she put my business on the internet and the circumstances for over 1,500 strangers to see on her Facebook on how people shouldn’t talk about suicide to her because it upset her; almost within the same breath of having told me to always come to her when things get to how they were.

My attempt and Chester’s suicide so soon after was a wake up call. I hadn’t been that low since my ex husband and I had separated before the divorce. Even my miserable experience in Pennsylvania hadn’t gotten my mind that bad. I’m not a suicidal person by nature. I fear death, because there’s too much left in this world to experience and I thrive off learning. Can’t do that if you’re dead. I went off all the medications entirely and I’m myself again, able to cope better with my ups and downs without the chemicals in my head being thrown off by all these artificial replacements.

Not that I’m an advocate for that as it does help some people function better depending on their condition. It’s just I’ve never had a condition that anyone’s ever been able to pinpoint as one thing, so they never could figure out what medications I might actually need. Ask one doctor and they’ll tell you I’m bipolar. Ask another, they’ll tell you I suffer from PTSD from my childhood. Another tried to diagnose me with summer seasonal disorder. My old boss thought I was a mix of OCD, anxiety disorders and cyclothymia. As a teenager, they tried to diagnose me as borderline personality disorder, which has NEVER fit me and came with a stigma I never earned or deserved.

They don’t know anything and they don’t take the time to talk to me to find out anything, they just throw labels of diagnosis around. Psychiatry isn’t an exact science because we still don’t fully understand the brain. Pills don’t fix me, getting me to focus on my proper coping skills fixes me. I can only rely on myself for that. That’s why I art in any form I can, but most importantly, it’s why I write and I couldn’t write while so sick and drugged up.

The cocktail of medications I was on was what was killing me, not the stress, as I’ve been able to manage it better since my system’s been clean of anything but weed, my mini pill birth control (so no estrogen) for my endometriosis and B complex. But it’s another lesson I’ve had to relearn while balancing adulthood on my own and I’m thankful for that too, that I’m even still here. I shouldn’t be. Not after that much Amitriptyline. I’m not a religious person, but clearly I’m not done learning and experiencing. Chalk it up to whatever you believe in. I just think my story isn’t finished.

Being on my own has helped me escape. I grew up an only child, so I need space. I’m an empath by nature. My dad used to tell me I was too sensitive and I had to learn to quit, but I never did. It’s why I hate religion because I see how it hurts others and I feel that. I feel the political situation in this country and all the damage it’s causing to humanity. I’m a sponge for information, but I also take in all those emotions of everything and everyone around me. Animals, peoples, things. I feed off energy. It’s draining. I have a certain allotment of what I can handle socially and then I need my space from all human contact.

The independence I have now gives me that and I get the chance to detox from the world. I haven’t had the ability to do that in a long time, but I’ve had the chance this year to recognize how badly I needed that opportunity and to do so again, without judgement or people jumping to conclusions as to why I might not have any interest in socializing. It’s not a lack of interest, it’s too much interest. Now I know that it’s okay that I do that, that I step back sometimes, and I recognize that when I couldn’t before because I was always surrounded by people. It’s just me, who I am and I get to embrace it and that’s been eye opening. Everything this last year has been.

There’s no rhyme or reason for any of this. Consider these all just wine thoughts and reflection. I like to ramble. If anyone even read all this, kudos to you.