Sharing my many thoughts
Month: November 2015
I started writing this post well over a year ago. It’s been in my drafts the entire time. I wanted to finish it and post it today.
Here’s a post that really ties together the two main words in the title of my blog – a post heavy in both discussion of family (namely my own family life) and heavy in discussion of fandom. 😉
Content warnings for discussions of personality disorders, bipolar disorder, child abuse, brief mentions of violence and suicide.
I just finished reading Kasey Weird’s old blog post from April 2013 on Feeling Sexy, which I had not come across before.
https://valprehension.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/feeling-sexy/
I read the post, and NessieMonster’s comment on it, too, which then turned into a full blog post on NessieMonster’s own blog, and I read that too:
And then Kasey Weird wrote a follow-up post with further thoughts on the topic:
https://valprehension.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/further-thoughts-on-feeling-sexy-and-also-on-dating/
After all that…
Today, Jo posted a nice index of all of her blogging on asexuality. In it, I discovered this interesting post from 2012 titled, Sex or Society: the pressure to be attractive (an experiment):
Jo’s post there includes a lot of comments from asexual-spectrum folks on whether or not they think their asexuality influences their desire (or lack thereof) to “look sexy”, to “be attractive”, etc.
Those four posts give me some insight on the phenomenon of feeling sexy, and give me a lot to think about.
I think I have never truly felt sexy. Which, as a fact, is kind of fascinating to consider. I never really considered it before, but I am considering it now.
The Asexual Agenda Question of the Week last week on what people think about the term “asexy” had already got me started me thinking about this a bit too, because of its relation to the term “sexy”.
Sexiness seems to be a very complicated concept tied up in gender roles and heteronormativity, and for straight cis women it is complicated enough. For any other group to feel sexy or be perceived as sexy, things get much more complicated.
I’m an asexual woman who thought I was straight up until I started questioning if I was asexual and then, consequently, identifying as asexual.
Personally, while I already know this isn’t true for all asexuals, I’m sure my lack of feeling sexy in my life has to do with me being asexual.
Continue reading “An Exploration of Not Wanting to Be Sexy, and of Never Feeling Sexy”
I wanted to answer the Asexual Agenda’s “Question of the Week” this week, but my answer was getting too long. So I’m turning it in to a stand-alone post. And now I’ve made it even longer because it’s just on my own blog haha.
Siggy asked: What are your friendships like?
My answer: I think, sort of like the ambiguity of words like “Family”, I have a very large range of people I consider “Friends”, and my relationship with each person is different degrees of closeness, spanning all the way to “former friend” or “almost-friend” because for whatever reason I decided I didn’t like them enough or we 100% fell out of touch.
I hosted the Carnival of Aces this past month. Below is the round-up of posts written this month on Aromanticism & The Aromantic Spectrum.
To see many wonderful posts for other topics written about for past carnivals, or to host and come up with your own theme for a future Carnival of Aces, check out the masterpost, here: https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/a-carnival-of-aces-masterpost/ which also explains what the Carnival of Aces is.
I found it surprisingly enlightening, in the end, with people posting a vast array of experiences and opinions on related topics. We ended up with 14 total people submitting, and 17 links for you to click!! Please consider reading all of the amazing posts.
Continue reading “October 2015 Carnival of Aces Round-Up (Aromanticism & The Aromantic Spectrum)”
This is a late entry for the October 2015 Carnival of Aces on Aromanticsm and the Aromantic Spectrum, which I myself was hosting here on this blog. Sorry for the delay. The full round up will be posted within the hour!
First things first: I must update you loyal readers of my blog. Some of you may remember I identified as wtfromantic. That still accurately describes my feelings toward romantic and platonic “feelings” and “attractions”, even the whole relationships aspect of it… It still describes my place on the aro spectrum pretty accurately, I think. But I’ve slowly started to ease into identifying as aromantic lately. For a lot of reasons. I feel like the more I think about it, the more it’s just easier to embrace being aro ace (meaning “aromantic asexual”) — that my life is playing out that way. I’m aromantic in a practical sense, in the way I live my life, in the way romantic… relationships, feelings, anything — just aren’t a factor anymore. I consider myself both wtfromantic and aromantic, while also being asexual. It felt freeing when I realized I could claim both aromantic & wtfromantic at once, that I didn’t have to choose.
I could write a whole blog post on the subject, but today I want to address another topic. I want to talk about being an aro ace, yet desiring to become a parent.
Allow me to backtrack.
Like many kids raised by a single mother who was abusive, I often felt drawn toward fictional stories about orphans. About children struggling, or even children whose parents abandoned them and made them practical orphans despite their parents being alive. For me and my younger brother, growing up was living in a constant state of fear that Mom would “get mad”. It meant us constantly walking on metaphorical eggshells and my dad commenting that the extreme ease with which something might startle me is because living with my mother made me hypervigilant. I was always hoping that maybe if I was prepared enough, careful enough, etc, I could prevent her rage. I was always hoping that maybe I wouldn’t have to spend hours crying, so many tears running down my face I would wonder if this might be why I’d get dehydration headaches sometimes.
I fantasized about her disappearing, about a life where she didn’t exist, and I didn’t care if it was death or what because it was all so abstract and just focused on me, and my brother, and not needing to live in this environment anymore.
I also fantasized about being a mother one day. Continue reading “Being an Aro Ace and Desiring (Foster and/or Adoptive) Parenthood”
From Fandom to Family 