#they're only like seven dollars now jesus christ...

[lightgaswaterelectricityrent]

you know I haven't had a bag of authentic kettle salt and vinegar chips in ages. maybe I'll go find myself one today

[maryellencarter]

This meme has been going around on my Dreamwidth, so I thought I might as well bring it over. All the "orientation" questions originally asked about sexuality specifically, but as my primary queerness is aromanticism and my sexuality is largely a great big blob of timey-wimey, I changed them. Still pretty amatonormative, but whatever, I've been up all night livetweeting a Castle of Cagliostro themed ACNH dream island tour and I definitely don't have enough brain to rebuild a meme from the ground up.

***

Orientation: Aromantic, something that isn't completely asexual but might be anywhere from aegosexual to allosexual. Sexual orientation fluctuates vastly, although I'm almost always attracted to men at least to some extent. I tend to be attracted mainly to people of the gender I currently am, which is entertaining and sometimes winds up with me being LGBT all at once, or at least in a very short span of time. Now, whether that's going to be sexual attraction or sensual or aesthetic or one of the others -- your guess is as good as mine in a particular instance. Aromantic is the only identity I've got that doesn't just go completely haywire at irregular intervals.

Gender Pronouns: I usually go by they/them online to facilitate asynchronous interactions (jesus, you can tell I've been up a while, I'm breaking out all the five-dollar words at once). Most of the time, they/them fits best. Sometimes I start feeling strongly he/him or she/her and then everybody gets confused, often including me.

Gender: Genderfluid, usually transmasc. I get very twitchy about being too cis or het, even though... y'know, as several friends have tried to get through my head, it doesn't invalidate my queerness if I sometimes happen to line up with my assigned gender and expected orientation. It just... feels really, really scary, like somebody is going to catch me being a (nearly) straight woman and make me marry that nice Catholic boy and start popping out babies. :P

(I've been feeling very female for a while now and I'm not coping with it well. Brain shit is complicated.)

Relationship Status: Partners and co-authors with @camshaft22 for the last four years and counting.

Celebrity Crush: I don't like having crushes. Occasionally I get one and I never handle it well. They're vastly uncomfortable, they hijack my brain when I need it for other things, they're embarrassing for all concerned, and they need to stop. I haven't had a celebrity crush specifically since my pre-internet days and I hope to god it stays that way.

Crush: No. My last meatspace crush no longer works where I do, thank fuck, and I really fucking hope I can go another twenty years before catching another one. Crushes have no redeeming qualities for me as an experience.

Best Friend: When I was a tiny autistic tortoise and had no friends, I had elaborately ranked lists of all the girls I was told I was friends with / was trying to be friends with. I haven't labeled someone a "best friend" in a really long time. I have a lot of friends, and Leia is my friend and also my primary relationship, which I suppose would count if you wanted it to, but the actual term just doesn't click for me.

When I came out: Hah. Depends what as and who to. Including coming out to myself a whole bunch of times. I knew when I was about two or three that I wasn't a girl and that I didn't want to be a wife. I realized when I was thirteen that I liked girls and scared the shit out of myself so badly that I still haven't entirely dealt with that. I was twenty-seven when I realized I was genderfluid. I still haven't had a chance to find out if I like kissing.

First person I came out to: As anything? Christ, I don't know. It would have been as asexual, that was the first identity I tried on, and it would have been to somebody in my bio-family. It's not a good memory, so I don't think about it.

First GF/BF: Leia. I never dated. Didn't have the chance in high school because I was in a very "wait until marriage", chaperones-and-courting sect of Catholicism, and none of the boys my age were interested in the loud butch with no boundaries. I've been too isolated to try since, and being romance repulsed didn't help. I think I still have profiles on one or two dating websites somewhere, at the behest of some therapist or other, but I was basically feeling like "I'm eventually going to have to suffer through this romance bullshit in order to have any chance of finding someone who might give me some scraps of what I want", and I just never quite got desperate enough to put myself through the extra depression.

Then Leia came along and saw me talking about Hobbie Klivian in a tiny Discord server and went "I want that one", and now she has a me. Sometimes just sitting around waiting for the right person to fall into your lap works just fine. XD

First heartbreak: Uh. Really hard to define when you're aromantic. Also when you're autistic and "none of these people actually like me" is a baseline of your childhood. Also when your mother is aggressively shipping you with every boy in range from the time you're born. I think I'm gonna have to pass on this one.

Crush on a straight person: I've had like maybe three crushes in my life. They're debilitating, years-long messes that I can't seem to get over no matter how hard I try. And crucially, a major component is that I get tongue-tied and can't talk directly to the guy at all. So I don't actually know if they were straight. They weren't out as anything else, to my knowledge.

Fallen for a friend: I'm aromantic. Friendship is as far as I fall. (Okay, that's catchy but doesn't quite answer the question. The less catchy answer is that I just don't have the wiring alloromantics seem to be talking about where... where friendship has a guardrail separating it from "you wanna try this thing together?" Now, I also don't feel attraction to real people that much or that often, and most of my friends are some flavor of aro/ace anyway, but... I guess what I'm saying is that if somebody I like as a friend made a move, it'd be a case-by-case thing, I wouldn't have to be like "can I jump this barrier and start having romantic feelings about you" because that's just nobody.

Cool straight friend: Uh. Do I know any straight people? I think the barbarian at D&D is the token straight person there. Is anybody here straight? ;P

Cool queer friend: Everybody else, obviously.

Person that made me doubt my orientation: One of the people I snurched this from pointed out that this could easily be read as "person who was an asshole and made me worry I was straight/etc", rather than a queer awakening in some sense. In the first way, my bio-family, for many many years. In the second way... I don't really have a "Captain Janeway made me gay" sort of moment, but there were a bunch of really pretty girls at youth group when I was thirteen, and then there was Huttslayer Leia when I was eighteen and that definitely did *something* to me that I truthfully have still not figured out entirely.

Am I proud of my orientation: Mneh. I don't really feel like being proud comes into it. I'm not ashamed of it. Being aromantic is just who I am. I... I also maybe feel a little weird talking about it as the only partnered romance-repulsed aro I know of. It's a lot of complicated shit and I don't completely understand it myself well enough to feel like I can answer the kind of intrusive questions I used to get about trans shit.

Am I comfortable with my orientation: Pretty much. I wouldn't know what to do with myself as anything else, that's for sure.

Describe myself: Like all my identities? Because just me, I'm a turtle who ought to be in bed. But if we wanted to go full microgranular identities, I could say something like... aromantic masc-leaning bisexual gray-ace, transmasc-leaning genderfluid intersex, technically probably polyamorous but very tired, sometimes bi-gender sometimes nonbinary usually gay occasionally lesbian, always queer.

My queer hero: I'd have to say the older bisexual lesbian lady (she used both labels, as one does) who mentored me when I was still a homophobic but well-meaning youngster. I've lost track of her now but she and her wife were my first example of a healthy relationship.

Favorite part of being queer: Definitely the not having to worry about romance anymore. Y'all can have that. It seems tiring.