So the first healthy step is to throw away everything I think I know or understand about sexuality, either from what people have told me or what I’ve absorbed from the culture around us—but particularly as pertains to the misapprehensions that others used to hold about me.

What I’m increasingly seeing is this deep and meaningful intersection between my sexuality and my understanding of my gender. It’s really hard to for me to hold in my head without that as a framework. Likewise I want to do that as free as I can of gender preconceptions, but, well. I may flub a bit as I get used to the dynamics, because I’m really really not used to thinking of myself in sexual terms, to acknowledging any of the thoughts and feelings that my mind has always produced and I just… Learned to ignore. So, this is gonna be clumsy. Workin’ on it.

In the cases where I make a kind of a dumb assertion about gender roles or whatever, I mean. I’m Azure. I don’t go in for that shit. I’m non-binary. But I need some kind of a language to communicate to myself the things that are going through my head and ascribe them some meaning. We’ll work on the nuance as I stop bumping against the walls and start to figure out how best to talk about the things I’m trying to feel out. Until then if I do some questionable shit like associating being a bottom with femininity, just, I’m talking about me here. My wiring.

I have never ever been comfortable talking about sex, at all, in any sense other than stupid jokes. And definitely not comfortable entertaining deep thoughts about it within myself. So, uh. Yeah. I’m wearing flippers to a tap dance recital. But at least I’m showing up now.

If it seems like I’m setting up an abundance of caution, then well yeah. This inherently freaks me out to engage with, and every little concession and admission that’s brought me to the point of thinking about it deeply has been a point of rending concern, verging on panic. But, well. Exhale. I know me well enough now—roughly speaking. I understand that nearly all my fear is other people’s garbage that I’ve just been carrying around all these years. But I also do know this can be sort of sensitive. So I just, uh. Want to go about it methodically.

Where the method leads me is, the intersectionality of me. How all of these elements, none of which I was correctly informed about and I’ve been having to reassemble from core principles and observations, interplay and inform each other. My sexuality only makes sense to me as a girl—non-binary, trans, or otherwise. I am what I am. Without that key, everything feels wrong. Deeply upsetting. But through that lens… okay. I think I am starting to get a small hold on things. Like, they’re beginning to make sense.

There’s an element of how attraction works and how to read it, an element of preferred roles and behaviors. And, I don’t have better words for it and a way to distinguish it as clearly as I feel it, but a big wash of the emotional implications for me. Which is so hazy, I know.

As my rantings for the last week would indicate, my choice to start to unpack all of this is catalyzed by just, Christ, a certain dam breaking—after a long period of cracks and drizzle—regarding my feelings toward cis men, right. Which is a whole thing for my brain to deal with.

I should stress this isn’t in relation to any real people, because, aroace, right? Which is another whole dynamic to workshop, because that is so important and fundamental to what makes me who I am. But attraction, sexuality, they’re complicated fuckers. So to speak. Lotsa levels.

I know for a fact and it feels like it should be self-evident that obviously I can and do and have and will feel attraction to anyone of any gender, except to the extent that I don’t toward anyone in reality. But, right now we seem to have hit on a certain fixation. So—okay.

It’s a thing that, it’s always been latent, like everything about me. None of this is new. It couldn’t be. That’s not how people work. It’s just that only a narrow range of my attractions were… Safe, or socially acceptable, enough to acknowledge as real and so to entertain. And even then, the aroace thing again, I was always encouraged to misinterpret the feelings I could admit in… Less than healthy or productive ways. So in a sense I’ve got a lot of stuff to unpack about all these dimensions of attraction, right. For different reasons.

Ideologically it feels wrong to me to be gendering my attractions like this. Like, I know for a fact that I’m not bi; gender doesn’t really factor into the way I see people. It’s just, fuckin’ repression, right. Once you let go of the pressure, well: boom. All this unaccounted wetness. So, that’s a part of the messiness until I figure out how to organize my thoughts and feelings sensibly. Right now, my brain’s just kinda going nuts with a narrow range of, hey, I can do this now. and… Fine. You know. It is what it is. We can humor this until it evens out.

It almost feels problematic that it’s not until I get comfortable understanding myself as a girl, like holy shit how could I be misunderstood as anything else, that I start to go, welp, guess dudes are on the menu then! It doesn’t read right, you know. But that’s, uh, incidental? It’s more a matter of just, knowing who the hell I am, establishing a frame of reference. Though yeah, there’s going to be some subconscious cultural garbage to strip out of there of course. We do live in a society, and so forth.

Knowing who I am makes me less scared of things. And anything to do with sex or sexuality is terrifying for me. But as I said earlier, we can keep sex per se on the back shelf for now, mostly, at least in practical terms, while we deal with the more existential issue here. You know, it’s fine. I’m ready. I can handle it. Maybe.

So yeah. There’s my lens. I’m a girl, with a sexuality. And the sexuality pertains to me as a girl, as much as it does to me as a person—even as my sexuality does not particularly concern itself with anyone else’s gender. Except for when it does. Like when one gets a hankering.

Which I guess seems normal, reasonable, rational enough. I’ve been eating a lot of cheese lately, but eventually I’ll get tired and drift to something else. One fixates, one rotates. One appreciates. (Heck, a thing I adore about my own body is how much variety there is to appreciate.) And I guess as one explores, one incorporates. All that one finds, will inform everything else once one gets back to it. I can take this a piece at a time, just break it down to what I’m feeling in the moment, what it means to me, and just… trust that it will add up.

So, March 2021, where we are is, Azure is a girl who at least broadly and non-specifically, all up in the fantasy and hypothesis and art and literature, is permitting herself to fixate on cis dudes. And, uh. All of the mechanics and dynamics associated with that hazy attraction. We’ll see what happens from here.