Risk & Courage, Disappointment & Resilience, Everything Changing & Me Catching Up (Part 1 of 3)

This is a post written for the June 2016 Carnival of Aces, which was themed around “Resiliency”.  

I split this post up into 3 parts to make for better ease of reading, and also because I wrote them pretty far apart lol. I wrote in separate chunks. Part 2 is here, and part 3 here.

---

This long, 3-part post itself involves me taking some pretty big risks, putting myself out there in multiple ways I haven’t yet on this blog.

But a huge theme of this post will be risks I’ve taken especially in the past year or so, and the risks I continue to take, how my life has in the past year been much more categorized than in years prior by… purposefully making myself vulnerable, because hopefully, in the end, the rewards would be worth the risks I was taking. Because, as I remember Coyote spelling out in a blog post back in April,

When you take an emotional risk and aren’t punished for it — when your trust is validated, instead of your vulnerability exploited — that can make for a very rewarding experience.

That resonated SO powerfully with me.

 And if you’ve ever had a vulnerable experience that ended positively, I think it’s fairly easy to understand.  Sometimes you have to take a risk in order to see your judgement validated.

I have taken more risks recently. And a lot of them have to do with my asexuality in  some way or another. It felt like the only alternative options were to be almost completely closed off from true friendship with new people. It has felt like it would be so positive to take the risk that to not take it would leave me festering in negative feelings like regret, and like no one understands me, and…

Well first, a note: I haven’t entered a post in the Carnival of Aces since March, meaning I skipped two months worth of the carnival. I also haven’t blogged about asexuality or related issues at ALL since that post of mine in March. XD I have left lengthy comments on other people’s posts since then, but… my own blog here? It’s been quiet over in this neck of the virtual woods.

I almost entered a blog post in the carnival for April though; the beginning of my post today is going to be what was saved in my drafts from my unfinished entry for that, because while it would fit April’s theme, it also fits June’s theme of Resiliency.

Gaslighting & Love

This is part 3 of a series of posts I’m going to be writing on the topic of gaslighting (& my personal experiences with it).

[Content Notes: Discussion of my mother and her abuse, mainly her emotional/verbal/psychological abuse. Use of a NSFW curse word and discussion of a NSFW body part.]

Part 1 talked more about her abuse, specifically, and that post can be found here: Gaslighting & Crocodile Tears

Part 2 focused more abstractly on society with some undercurrents of my mother. Gaslighting & Santa Claus

---

I cut off all contact with my mother when I was 18 years old, but for another year-and-a-half or so my brother still was visiting with her, and he also was forced to endure something which I never had to, since it started after I was legally an adult: reunification therapy where he, our mother, and a psychologist would sit in a room together.

My brother didn’t like to talk much about his unpleasant experiences at those sessions, but when he did, he recounted my mother being a woman who would complain about our father the entire time, despite the therapist’s best efforts to get the conversation to be focused on something beside our dad. My mother felt the first two therapists were biased against her, so they switched to different psychologists for continued reunification counseling. My mother would insist my father was relevant because supposedly he had “brainwashed” me and my brother into thinking anything negative about her. Supposedly my father was evil. Supposedly there was no way my brother (or I) could have valid reasons of his (/our) own for having the strained-at-best relationship he (/we) did with her.

At one point, my mom started going too far with the third therapist, and he flat-out said to her, in the reunification session between her and my brother, “You’ve already lost your daughter. Do you really want to lose your son too?”

Update/Deadline on asking me about my queerplatonic partnership!

Hey everyone. So yes, even though Robert agreed to answer questions with me, and this plan to do this on my blog did happen quite recently… we actually ended up dissolving our queerplatonic partnership this past Thursday.

We’re still friends and I hope he will still be willing to answer questions with me for the blog, though. If not, I’ll still answer all of them.

I’ll stop taking questions around Monday, July 4th. Please get your questions in by then! I’ve only received 2 questions so far. Thank you to the tumblr Shades of Grayro for this post: http://shades-of-grayro.tumblr.com/post/146106897800/ever-had-a-question-for-a-queerplatonic-pair which eventually prompted both questions. 😉

The questions I’ve been asked:

1. I am a cis male in my early 30‘s who identifies as straight, demiromantic and quoiromantic.  Since I am quoiromantic, I am confused about what is romantic and what is platonic.  In dating, you hear a lot of words like “spark”,  “completing each other,” and “opposites attract” whereas words like, “comfortable around them,” “common interests,” and “easy to talk to” can apply to either romantic or platonic relationships.  My observation is that maybe you need that “spark” to jump from a friendship to romantic relationship.  In queerplatonic relationships, would you *need* some sort of spark or is that exclusively for a romantic relationship?            

2. “I think my question would be about how it started; what was that conversation like and how did you bring it up? Granted, the fact that you are both ace and probably knew what a QPP was already probably helped but I am still curious how one moves from ‘really good friends bordering on something else’ to actually having the conversation. “

Remember anonymously sending me an ask on my tumblr (luvtheheaven) with your question, or sending me an email at pemk7@aol.com is totally fine. Your name doesn’t have to be publicly associated with your question anywhere.

I’d be happy to talk about my friendship with Robert before the queerplatonic partnership, about the queerplatonic relationship, about the break up, or even about our friendship since then. We’re actually going to spend Independence Day weekend together with a couple of other friends of ours, as well, so answering questions AFTER July 4th should be pretty good timing.

I just wanted to update all of you.

My Queerplatonic Relationship: Ask us anything!

So coming up in about a week will be the four month “anniversary” (4th monthiversary) of me and Robert* deciding to officially become queerplatonic partners!

I asked him if he’d be interested in doing a thing for my blog where we interview each other and post some answers for my readers. He said he would be up for that!

And then I suggested that maybe my followers would have some questions for both of us (or in a few cases, for one or the other person). Robert thought that was a good idea, asking you guys to help us.

That means you guys, my readers, coming up with questions that the two of us in this relationship will answer (unless for whatever reason we decide we don’t want to answer – no promises on answering every question we get.).

You may pose questions just for him, especially if it’s a question where you already know how I’d answer because of my previous blogging, you can ask a question just for me, or you can ask a question that both of us will try to answer.

For basic information, I identify as both wtfromantic & aromantic, and I am asexual. I’m 26 years old, cis-female.

Robert is aromantic and gray-asexual, 27-years-old, and cis-male.

I look forward to seeing what questions you might pose for us to potentially answer in the comments below!

Alternatively, if you wish to ask a question more anonymously than in the comments, feel free to email me the question(s) at pemk7@aol.com and I will keep your identity private, no one besides you and me has to know you asked.

 

---

* Robert is not his actual name. He chose this name, when I asked him to provide an alias for my blog. 😉