Monthly Archives: March 2021

Start of the Breakdown

  • Reading time:6 mins read

To proceed, we may need to distinguish a few things. The trauma I have around sex per se is different from the trauma that I have around my sexuality—though both are really difficult for me to engage with to the degree I need to unpick everything. (Well, half of my sexuality, I guess I should say. The part that isn’t just nope.)

It’s way easier for me to engage with my gender, though even that has kind of two levels to it. My enbyness was obvious and no problem at all; it took a lot more work to connect with my femininity. Either way, ultimately that’s just an obvious visceral fact of me. Clearly I’m a girl, and clearly that’s on my own terms rather than some external binary road map. And, okay. Sure. It’s all inward-focused, about my relationship to myself. I can work that out, with time.

Before we even get there, though, we need some body autonomy, which is provided by recognizing my aroaceness. That’s kind of the key to everything about me, the thing that allows me ownership over myself in a way I never previously understood.

It’s all the other parts, when it stops focusing entirely inward, that are hard for me. Whenever just the concept of other people enters the picture, the terror comes along with them, right—and that scrambles and complicates any effort to understand what’s really happening, how I function.

Breaking the problem down, though—I think that may help. I think it’s easier to engage with one part at a time, carefully strip out the bits that are just other people’s damage and tend to what’s left, puzzle it into a working order and see what it’s really like under there. I think the question of the trauma around sex itself is just too big for me, as I am now—and it’s not really pressing or important, in that I’m never going to have sex again. (Well, not with another person anyway.) That’s too hard, too painful, and just… not a priority to sift.

Sexuality, though, is a totally different thing, if obviously related. That’s way more hypothetical, more about ideas than actions. Yes it’s hard to engage with some of these ideas, but it’s just a playground of the mind in the end really. There is still mirrored glass. It’s way easier for me to deal with the notion of being pan, and what goes into that (or… hypothetically, uh, into me, one says with intense bottom energy), what it means for my ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world and the people around me and in my imagination—than it will ever be to deal with my past experiences, and how I feel about the actual practical elements of sex and just—

I can’t even finish that thought, Christ. Even approaching it makes the dam threaten to burst. I don’t feel like crying right now. It’s 12:30 am. So, I’m just—I’m not going to go there, for now. And that’s fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll never reconcile, never work at it. But, you know. One thing at a time. I don’t have to deal with what’s happened to me to play with the nuances of the way I’m wired to think and feel about people. That’s got enough baggage, that’s confusing enough. But, I think it’s workable if I just take it as its own thing. If deeply peculiar for me to engage with.

I’ve got so much to get over here. All this internal mess, that’s just a reflection of other people’s problems. And so much of that weight, it doesn’t even reflect the reality of who I am. It’s based on all these wild misconceptions of me as a person. So the question is, why am I listening to it? Why is it affecting me at all? But that’s how they get you with the programming, right.

So. Okay. I guess that’s kinda where my hyperfocus is gonna be for a while. Call this stage four of Azure unpacking (ignoring the neurology, which is related but kind of its own separate set of concerns from the whole queer parade I’ve got running through my head here). I’m a non-binary girl. I’m so very aroace, holy shit. But, it is also clear that I am intrinsically pan. And that’s weird to engage and hard for me to understand, and I guess I’m ready to try now.

To be precise, I need to understand it in relation to me, to Azure, not to the gender that other people misdiagnosed for me so long ago, or the persona they projected onto me. That’s never going to lead anywhere useful.

I got, like, feelings here. And I guess this is a long time coming, huh. I’ve never really been in a place in my life, in my relationship to myself, to even begin to figure them out. They’ve always been here in hindsight, same as I’ve always been a girl even when I didn’t have the tools to see it clearly. I just, what feelings I housed, they weren’t ready to rise to the surface.

In this dive, I don’t want to be crass about it. I don’t want to be performative or weird. I definitely don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. But this isn’t about anyone else; this is me, this is is my space, my self, my recovery. And I guess this needs to be my interest for the next while.

So. Okay. Shit, fine. Yeah. I’m, uh, gonna have to think on this, and where to go from here. Now that we’re dropping this next brick of shame off the highest possible bridge.

God, this is what we’re actively engaging with now.

All right. Let’s see where this leads.

I’m hella pan here. And, uh. Right now the fixation is on certain dimensions of that which have a novelty of not previously being allowed recognition.

It’s normal for a girl to be into dudes. Well, if it were anyone else I’d say of course it is, dummy. It’s normal for anyone to be into anyone. It’s always different rules for me than for others. I’m gonna have to really start checking myself on that line of thinking.

Whee, so.

…

Here we go, I guess.

Muddle Bubble

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Sexuality is weird when you’re aroace, all the more so when you’re trans. Just because you don’t feel attraction to people, and may possibly be averse to things, doesn’t mean you don’t have ideas in your head; fantasy, preference, interest, appreciation. It’s just theoretical.

Lately that theory has mostly been based around dudes. Which is hard to process. I don’t know how to really categorize anything, because people aren’t math problems, but I kind of feel like my head is making up for years of repression and trying to sort of even the balance.

Like, my subconscious is kind of going, oh yeah that is a possibility too huh. So that’s kind of… where all of those energies seem to flow these days when my head goes to those places. I’m guessing when the novelty rubs off it’ll be like okay, had my fill of this. We’re good now.

Ideologically I am so obviously pan, right. It doesn’t even make sense to me to engage a person on any basis other than who they are as a person. Who really cares about the practical details, beyond how they support their whole deal as a human. But, uh. Right now I’m in a mode.

And it’s confusing me, and making me feel all sorts of weird things that I don’t know how to manage too well. But I guess these are what one will work through.

I think my second puberty may just be hitting me really hard here.

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.

Things I Like About My Body: March 2021

  • Reading time:4 mins read

1: the tickle of my hair down the small of my back, whenever I take my top off or step into the shower.

2: the shape of my eyes, especially that strange, difficult upper lid that I find so tricky to define with liner and seems to hide so many secrets I may never fully unlock.

3: the near total disappearance of the acne bequeathed by my maldeveloped first puberty.

4: my lack of body hair beyond my limbs and pubis, and the relative thinness, fineness, and fairness of most of that even.

5: the developing shape of my legs, in particular my thighs. They’re nothing amazing, but they no longer look like turkey legs in the grocery bin. They’re just normal and human and proportionate. And they have gained some nice curve.

6: my hips and butt, which also have gained a little curve and volume. It’s moderate; it’s a start. But what a difference from before.

7: my breasts, which have changed my world in so many ways I had no way of understanding until they stepped in and helped me to claim my body for myself for the first time in my life. They’re fun and silly, and gaining some nice definition of late. They change my whole body.

8: my cheekbones, which are possibly the easiest feature to deal with in the event I muster the energy to make myself up, and that lend my whole face a delicacy that makes up for several elements I’d rather were different than they are.

9: the shape of my hairline as it continues to mend and fill back in, and has begun to frame my face a little better.

10: the weirdo button bulb to my nose, with its groove between the nostrils. It’s strange but distinctive. My nose doesn’t look like anyone else’s, to be sure.

11: my narrow frame; how naturally little muscle mass I seem to carry, how small my chest is and how moderate my shoulders are. For all the reservations I have about my trouble gaining soft tissue, I do like my bone placement.

12: my weird alien toes. I’m learning to accept them for what they are. Again they don’t look like anyone else’s. They’re just me.

13: this curious fold that’s developed between my chin and my lower lip as my lips slowly continue to fill out and claim some normal amount of space on my face.

14: just everything about my genitals really. Not gonna dwell here. But that’s like the one thing that has never caused me dysphoria.

15: the shape of my neck (eve’s apple aside); its proportion to my skull and my shoulders.

16: the general shape of my back—now that the acne has basically gone away and I’m no longer averting my eyes and trying so hard not to put pressure on it when I lean back or lie down.

17: the flexibility and strength I’m building in my lower body; the muscles I’m finding in my hips and butt and waist, and the way they’re allowing me to move, rewrite my relationship to the space around me.

18: my slowly correcting posture, which changes everything about my circulation and the way I carry stress and generally the shape that my body presents to me.

19: the smoothness and hardness of my nails. I never knew they were supposed to be something other than thin vinyl overlays to my fingertips.

20: the thickness and smoothness and relative curliness of my younger girl-hair compared to the older growth toward the tips.

21: the change of shape to my pubic area; all this nice fleshy padding I didn’t have before.

22: the smoothness and the glow to my skin. Still basically transparent but it’s no longer this waxy pallor and it no longer feels like a plucked chicken. I just feel… Human.

23: the smell. I’m fuckin’ delicious these days.

24: my general flexibility. I have never had trouble pretzeling up, reaching in odd directions, and for all my clumsiness it offers at least some route to most physical goals.

25: the delicacy of my fingers. Pianist’s hands, I’ve always been told. Well, that would entail a level of diligence beyond my brain’s specifications. But, they are nice and spindly.