Lack of Choice

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Part of this weird chagrin I feel when forced to admit that historically everyone I’ve been involved with has been a cis woman comes from the understanding that there will never be anyone else. Like, there will never be an evening-out of the record, no proof of my sentiment:

“No, it’s not what it looks like! I like other people too! Don’t judge me! I’m way more interesting than it sounds, believe me!!”

Which indicates my other big problem: the lack of a sense of control, it leads to a certain shame. I’m still trying to reconcile my past and how much of that to consider fully consensual. Ideally I’d just not have not had any of those experiences. Like, none of this has much to do with me. I didn’t really choose it; it chose me, and I relented. It says nothing about me, and I sort of resent the implications that have been plastered onto me as a consequence.

On a deeper, if possibly stranger, level, I am so very clearly a bottom, to the extent that I am sexual at all (which is: nope), which the more that I unpack, the lack of regard for which informs much of the trauma I have experienced—and I feel that the incidental facts of my history misrepresent who I am in a way that furthers that core existential trauma.

Like, I don’t want to be tarred with anyone else’s brush. I don’t want to carry that anymore. If you’re gonna judge me, judge me for who I actually am. I can’t deal with being defined by my trauma any longer. But, I’m still trying to work out how to reconcile this dimension of it.

I’m sure nobody but me could possibly care about any of this. It’s just, it matters to my own feelings about myself, my self-possession, my basic body autonomy. And it’s rough in this weird vague painful way I keep trying to understand.

What Dreams May Come

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Ardently as I may be aroace, I feel like my fantasy life has loosened up and is making sense to a degree it never really had. Just allowing things to fall into their natural places, stop trying to force other people’s roles and expectations; so much dysfunction clears up. There’s so much I have been coaxed to do to myself, psychologically—playing out all these biases, fears, punishments, hiding and correcting and holding myself back from even my basic thoughts or feelings. And what was left never made sense; it just left me empty, dead, anxious.

Learning what happiness feels like, it gave me this tool that I never had, to measure all these other things against.

It is so wild to reassemble myself from such a granular level and see just how shaky the old architecture was, the lack of attention to basic supporting walls. I’ve been taught to misinterpret pretty much everything about myself; every day I feel like I find a new depth, realizing that signal doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, that this response is problematic to me personally for such-and-so reason.

There’s so much rewiring to do, it’s overwhelming; feels endless. But the more that I do, the more I find to salvage in here; it’s all good, actually—we have a perfectly workable person under all this, just been maintained by a bunch of idiots all these years.

Just need some time.