theyearofourlord3000

[theyearofourlord3000]

i've had to watch this video of a guy accidentally outing himself to his parents on instagram like 10 times and boy howdy

like, i've thought too much about this to stay sane against this much exposure

also, i just don't want to do these assignments, can't i just time travel to the end of my degree?

[theyearofourlord3000]

if someone could hit my with a productivity stick that'd be heckin rad

at the very least, i'd like some artificial opinions on existential theory

[theyearofourlord3000]

i just saw a commercial for soup that comes in a jar and wow it made me more uncomfortable than i thought it would

[theyearofourlord3000]

lol remember that time my dad gave the olive garden waitress a $20 tip to bribe her into filling a to-go container with his bottomless minestrone

[theyearofourlord3000]

wow, what a beautiful day to dwell on some random version of the future that won't happen

you can shut up any time brain

[theyearofourlord3000]

oh no, i just remembered the time that i sent a pretty nasty message to someone on facebook marketplace

i never behave like that but i just got so worked up and i am literally still so mortified oh my gosh

[theyearofourlord3000]

went on a tour today of a condo i'm considering purchasing, but apparently my dunce self didn't actually hit record on the video for my walkthrough of a listing with no posted pictures. so yes, i did spend at least 45 of my minutes today just describing the weird master bath and popcorn ceilings in various phone calls.

[theyearofourlord3000]

ugh, i finally got to start living my dream today and went to bar trivia, but i was greatly hindered by the fact that i do not drink. felt real cool drinking a single sprite in a bar for like, 3 hours.

[theyearofourlord3000]

man, remember toe socks?

[theyearofourlord3000]

just thinking about the time a psychic told me that i wasn't actually ace

[theyearofourlord3000]

my therapist says i need to see myself as more of an adult but the last 2! times i've purchased underwear have been an emergency so...

btw, any period havers been doing this sh!t for a decade and it still catches them off guard regularly? like, i'm 24, i shouldn't be throwing away my underwear in the staff bathroom.

[theyearofourlord3000]

i mean, i know it's bc i don't understand anything about science, but blood types just seem wicked fake

brought to you by me rewatching the vampire ep of psych

[theyearofourlord3000]

can you use your therapist as a professional reference? asking for myself.

[theyearofourlord3000]

ugh my parents and my sister have such a weirdly tense relationship and like my parents don't get why it's strained and my sister refuses to just like, communicate with them when she's unhappy and they always drag me into the middle of it but don't actually listen to me when i explain how they could improve things why

[theyearofourlord3000]

i'm not even sure what the title is, but i would pay an obscene amount of money to never hear that ed sheeran song again

[theyearofourlord3000]

questioning angst pt. 2: what even is romantic attraction?

i was pretty old before i realized that romantic and sexual attraction were (or i guess can be) separate. it probably really hit when the person running a safe space training i was in had us fill out the "gender unicorn" thing, which uses the terms physical and emotional attraction. i realize now that i was dealing with some stuff, but i kept asking our leader what the deal was with emotional attraction and said that i felt emotional attraction to my friends. all she was able to tell me was that it was different, but wasn't really able to tell me how. when we did the same activity at the next year's training, i didn't ask again (bc at that time i knew i was going through some stuff and didn't need to drag her into it).

when i was digging into asexuality, one thing i found helpful was the distinction between sexual attraction and aesthetic attraction. i had always thought that people were good-looking, but when i realized that what i was experiencing wasn't sexual attraction, it was nice to have a way to frame it. it also helped me get more comfortable expressing my "attraction" for women, since it really was all just appreciating appearances.

however, all this stuff with asexuality framed romantic attraction is something else that asexual people may or may not experience. of course, i also came across the term aromantic, which i understood as someone who didn't desire a relationship in that traditional sense. because that is basically something i wanted, i figured i wasn't aromantic. and because i couldn't see myself dating a woman, i figure i was heteromantic.

but what even is romantic attraction? with the media and the way i've understood everything at this point in my life, being attracted to someone is partially that emotional aspect (which a lot of times is described as friendship) + partially that physical/sexual attraction (which i figured out i don't experience) + the vague concept of wanting to like build a life and spend ludicrous amounts of time with. i always saw myself building a life with someone; taking care of foster kids, complaining about the crappy people at work, taking exceptionally lame vacations, waiting for each other to watch "our shows", helping each other achieve financial goals and stability. but are those things romantic? can i have those things without a romantic relationship? the things i generally associate with romance and relationships in general aren't really things that i want, but is that just cultural perception? and do i even really have a chance at finding something outside the norm that makes me happy? what in each direction do i sacrifice: a relationship with a lot of aspects i don't enjoy or a relationship at all? and so much of this might be moot anyway, because it is not my experience that people are really interested in me and i have a truly horribly time attempting anything in that realm.

i've got a lot of other angst about a bunch of other stuff in my life (my current job is literally to help kids figure out what they want to do but i have no idea so that's not great), so this probably needs to go backburner for a little bit, but at some point i really will have to come to at least a tenuous conclusion.

[theyearofourlord3000]

recording my angst about questioning my sexuality for posterity

okay, so i had never really thought to consider my sexuality and just assume i was straight. i grew up in a conservative christian household, so that wasn’t really on the table and it never really came up, so i just went with it.

about a year and a half ago, i was asked if i wasn’t straight twice in one week. once was by one of my high school students, who were always asking me personal questions i didn’t feel like answering, particularly this girl. i just avoid them and put them back on track. the other one was my therapist, who was looking for an explanation as to why i didn’t really date. i said no, but i was still thinking about it later.

when i got tik tok a few months later, i quickly ended up on gay tik tok (or at least that’s what every was calling it at the time), where i saw lots of videos that were like “gay people drive like this” and “gay people sit like this” and “you know you’re bi if you cuff your jeans”. and all these videos weirdly set me off bc i identified with almost all of them (except any that actually had anything to do with attraction or relationships). i genuinely started thinking i wasn’t straight bc of the way i sit in chairs, which is truly so dumb of me, but once again set me on a path of overthinking. 

once the pandemic hit and i moved back home, there was a lot going on in my head, and my therapist encouraged me to give it all a little more thought. i tried to take like, online quizzes or read more about how one even knows these things. i also downloaded a dating app and just started scrolling through everyone to figure out who i was attracted to (spoiler: it was basically no one). 

at some point in all this searching, i stumbled again over the term asexual. i knew about asexuality and had a vague understanding of what it was, but i hadn’t thought much about what that was actually like for people. after falling down a rabbit hole, i found that i identified with the vast majority of what i read about asexuality. 

for a while, it felt like i had everything figured out. it was:

sexually attracted to: no one

aesthetically attracted to: anyone

romantically attracted to: men

that felt right for a little bit, and like something i could explain to myself. except it didn’t feel right for long and then i had all this angst about the romantic attraction piece, which is where i’m at now. it feels like the only thing i have figured out is that i have no idea. well, i’m like 95% on the ace thing, which took forever to get to, which means that the romantic aspect will probably take a while too. goody.