UncommonNonsense

I have heavy scarring on my left arm from a burn. It runs from my wrist almost to my shoulder. It's blotchy, has an odd texture, and is a mix of reddened, vascular surface scarring and thick, white, stiff patches of much deeper scarring that pull and wrinkle oddly when I move my arm. I usually wear shirts with longish, loose sleeves in order to conceal it somewhat, but my work uniform shirt is short sleeved and I often catch people staring. The burn took 3 months to fully heal, and after it healed, I was *very* conscious of it and of other peoples' reaction to it. Because it was new scarring, it was very obvious. For years, I wore only long-sleeved shirts and only uncovered it to bathe and change clothing. Now, about 9 years after the burn, I'm so much more at ease about it. Of course, 9 years on, it has faded somewhat, not quite as red, and some of the thick white scarring has receded and looks a bit closer to normal skin. I no longer really care if people stare or ask questions (I'd rather they ask questions than jump to some ill-informed conclusion). I used to self-injure.... and I agree with you about how incredibly vulnerable and uncomfortable it is to reveal those wounds to another person, especially someone who doesn't know/understand self-injury.

I'm barely comfortable with being naked in my own bathroom, alone, with the door locked. I have never been at ease unclothed, even when I was younger and at least kind of cute. Now, I'm the kind of person who looks far, far better clothed!

Lucky. My workplace is literally surrounded by university student residence and condo buildings. The students are even allowed to use our back parking lot to park their cars (how the fucking hell are university students affording fucking luxury cars?!? I didn't own a car 'til I was 25, and it was a 3rd-hand Chrysler Concorde I kept until it was 15 years old and the transmission died!). My workplace has an extensive CCTV system that I am there to monitor (among other things), so I am very often 'treated' to events that squick me out on many levels... goofy joined-at-the-hip couple behaviour, PDA, exhibitionist couples going at it right in front of the camera, worse. For the really egregious crap, my instruction from my boss is "Call the cops on them!". I'm glad I don't have to be the one going back there into a poorly-lit back-40 parking lot at night to break up gross behaviour.

Here's a question, folks. Let's say you have a best friend who you do not/cannot date (for whatever reason - maybe they're not attracted to people of your gender). You want the best for this person because you care about them an awful lot. You're aro. You accept yourself and your identity, and you're not overly conflicted about being aro. Your best friend meets another aro person and is interested in this person. You don't know the person your friend is pursuing. Would you advise your friend that they should date an aromantic person, knowing that your friend is romantically-oriented? Or would you tell your friend to give up on this particular relationship? Would the gender and orientation of your friend make a difference? Would it make a difference to you if the aromantic person your friend likes is asexual or allosexual?

To be honest, 99.99999% of the popular music produced in the last 15 or so years absolutely flummoxes me as to how it became popular... but yes, that song, and others like it, songs that glamourize what really ought to be seen as the darkest, scariest side of romance, really bother me. Case in point, an oldie but a perfect example Police - Every Breath You Take When I hear that song on the radio, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There really seems to be a trend, in the last 10 or so years especially, towards normalizing some very abnormal, bizarre, and abusive behaviour in relationships. Books like '50 Shades of Grey', songs like 'Jealous', and the themes of jealous possessiveness and abusive control being desirable in a relationship (it proves he looooooves you!'), the idea that people have to ditch the friends and hobbies they loved before the relationship began once they become a couple, the idea that couples must be together constantly for all their non-workplace hours have all been really 'on the radar' recently... and they seem to be seen as much more normal and expected among younger people than my generation or my parents'. My married friends all have friends that were made before they were a pair, and friends they made individually after they were hitched, as did my parents. My married friends also have time to themselves, away from their partner, as did my folks (although, since we were an introvert family with some autistic traits - my HFA is absolutely genetic! - my folks may be less typical there... but often, Dad would be in the family room watching a car race while Mum was up in her study watching the Golden Girls and reading a book). Maybe that's just the lack of life experiences and maturity in many young people, maybe it's our culture pushing toxic ideas of what constitutes romance on the most impressionable group, or maybe it's something even darker... but I do find it worrisome.

I'm usually pretty romance-indifferent. What bugs me is PDA and being around a couple who are almost constantly hanging all over each other, using cloying, saccharine, baby-talking pet-names to refer to each other. That just sets my teeth on edge! The saccharine baby-talking bullshit really gets me repelled. Awful. Another thing that gets me - an addition to my dislike of PDA - is the sounds people produce when they're making out, all the grossly moist lip-smackings and weird moan-y little vocalizations they make. Cannot stand it. That will send me running to get away from their odious company. I also hate the possessiveness that seems to be a huge factor in romance. Any time one person tells another 'You're mine", I shudder involuntarily. Especially when it comes alongside an uneven power dynamic between the pair, which it all too often does. If anything romantic is aimed in my direction, especially if the person inflicting the romance on me is a heterosexual male (unfortunately, I've had some very terrible, terrifying, physically and emotionally scarring experiences with hetero guys who were seeking romance or sex and would not tolerate my saying no), my usual indifference goes from 1 to right off the scale, mixed with a certain amount of worry and even fear. I will avoid that person totally until that romantic/sexual interest has been extinguished.

I guess I always thought that if I ever truly fell in love, I'd suddenly understand and desire romance. This was encouraged by my mother, who said "I know you! When you fall in love, you'll fall **hard**!" (I suppose she based that on the fact that I became obsessive about topics that interested me - common autistic trait - and thought that my obsessive love for topics/shows/books/etc would carry over into obsessive love for a romantic partner. Sorry Mum, autistic, not romantic!). I also thought I just had higher standards than most people. I saw friends pairing off with partners who had (IMHO) *major* character defects and problematic bad habits and just shuddered! I was told that falling in love made a person blind to all that was negative about their partner. To me, that seemed very illogical. After all, if you married that person, you'd be stuck living with his/her/their character defects and bad habits for the vast majority of your life! To me, going into a relationship with both eyes relentlessly peeled open in regards to aspects of their personality and traits that you could not tolerate long-term felt much more logical. My parents also called me a 'late bloomer', which I never understood. After all, the changes to my body wrought by puberty happened exactly when they were expected to, so I wasn't late to start puberty. So that never made much sense either. I considered myself straight-by-default until I was about 17. That's when I began university. I had not dated much in HS (I actively avoided any guy I was told liked me that way!). I gave a lot of thought to why I wasn't interested in boys, and wondered if that meant I was a lesbian (For some reason, I never really gave any thought to my lack of interest in girls). I dated a lesbian woman who was a few years older than I was for a few weeks, but that went nowhere just like dating hetero boys had. That left me very much at sea again, and I ended up dating a guy again... bad move on my part, since he was the one who coerced/nagged/wheedled/whined/demanded/kind-of forced me into sex. After that, I ended up dating another guy who tried to rape me (thankfully, the unexpected arrival back home of my parents prevented that). And after that, I just decided that I'd had just about enough of dating and men for a while. I decided to stop trying to date. That worked for me. I still had no idea I was ace or aro at that point. But I just had to protect myself and my emotions, and dating was just putting both in danger. So I just quit dating. A few years later, I discovered there was a word that described me well - asexual - and some of the puzzle pieces slotted into place. Then. my parents finally told me I'd been diagnosed autistic at three years old. I was re-diagnosed as being HFA later that year and lots more puzzle pieces fit themselves in. Later, I realized that agender was also a term that fit me. Much later, after identifying as hetero-romantic ace for quite a long time, I realized that the term aromantic fit me far, far better. The rest of the puzzle pieces fit in. I'm an autistic, agender, aromantic asexual. And those labels feel right to me.

Well, here's me. Bear in mind, I'm diagnosed HFA (High Functioning Autism) and ADHD (though it was just called 'Hyperactive' when I was a kid), but I'm a lot older than a lot of you and was exposed to a lot of intervention meant to force me to act 'normal', so it is sometimes hard for me to separate what is natural for me and what has been forced (and sometimes beaten) into me. Treatment of autistic kids in the 70's and 80's was quite a lot different than now (though what's going on now is still terrible, IMHO). Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 160 of 200 Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 45 of 200 You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)

Yep. And I don't understand why people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their weddings. Especially with the cost of housing being what it is. To me, the money spent on the dress (worn once), the flowers (will wilt and die in a couple of days), food (which no one really likes anyway), gigantic cake (I've never met a wedding cake that tasted good), fancy venue (will be forgotten by the guests), limos (really? tack-a-rific!), bridesmaid dresses (always ugly, worn only once), DJ (usually cringe-worthy), and booze (just provokes unfortunate behaviour from certain guests, which will be all anyone remembers about the wedding in years to come) is just a giant waste. It could go for a down payment on a house, or pay for a car once the couple starts living together. A huge, expensive, showy wedding is nothing but social one-upmanship and conspicuous consumption, both of which I find repulsive.

I'm another one who doesn't understand the 'joined at the hip' aspect of some people's relationships. You know - when you never see just one of them. If A is there, B is automatically there (and they are usually in some sort of prolonged physical contact that starts to feel veeeeery awkward after a while to those who are in their company) and you will never, ever see one without the other. I don't get that. I'm the type of critter that requires enormous (at least by other people's standards) amounts of alone time. This is how I recharge my batteries, so to speak. Interacting with people drains me and makes me feel fatigued and overwhelmed - autism thing - especially since when I'm with people, I am faking being neurotypical, using what I call my Neurotypical Emulation Software, a very cognitively demanding set of scripts and rehearsed actions that allow me to operate among non-autistics without attracting so much of their negative attention, so being alone is how I reconnect with my authentic, autistic, stimmy self, shed my anxiety, and regain energy lost to having to run such demanding mental software all the time and suppressing my natural autistic stims and coping mechanisms. If I am forced to go without my alone time, I get really short-tempered, depressed, exhausted, anxious, really vulnerable to sensory intrusion and overload, emotionally vulnerable and oversensitive, and just plain wiggy. So to me, a partner wanting to be with me aaaaaallll the time is threatening, not positive in the least. I also don't understand why so many people now are willing to drop beloved hobbies, interests, and friends if their partner has no interest in them. To me, having solo interests is important, and that's the kind of relationship I saw modelled by my own parents. Dad loved cars and car racing, and Mum loved home decorating. Dad watched races and went to car shows (often inviting me to watch or go with him) and Mum enjoyed shopping and fixing up our home, which had been bought as a fixer-upper and was eventually quite a showpiece. And both had lots of friends, mutual ones and otherwise. To me, dropping interests and (especially) friends in a relationship is crazy, dangerously isolating, and just plain wrong, abandoning aspects of personal identity for the sake of someone else... that just raises my hackles and makes me shudder involuntarily.

I'm another one who doesn't understand why jealousy, obsession, and possessiveness are seen as romantic instead of as abusive. To me, all three are major red flags and they'd have me running in the opposite direction. Another thing that perplexes me is how predatory and just plain assholish a lot of romantic tropes really are. Like the one where a guy relentlessly pursues a woman who clearly wants nothing to do with him, and the 'happy' ending being that she eventually gets exhausted and broken down enough to agree to date him. That isn't romantic! That's an entitlement-poisoned creep being a total dick! There are so many of these, and they just make zero sense to me.

Humidity. Yuck. The worst.

This damnable heat is really kicking my butt. I'm on a couple of medications that have heat sensitivity as a side effect. Being too hot, especially for a prolonged period can make me feel very sick, give me a migraine, give me digestive problems, make me nauseous, and make me very fatigued. And that 'prolonged period' can be as little as half an hour, if it's very, very hot or I have to be physically active. If I can be pretty still, and the heat isn't above 24C, I can tolerate it for about 3 hours before I start getting sick. Ive been going from air conditioned place to air conditioned place and staying in our basement TV room. I loathe summer.

Some products are finally showing non-hetero couples in ads. Tide is good for this.. they've had... um.. 3 so far, I think. But yeah, most products are advertised by 'gorgeous woman and gorgeous man in obvious romantic relationship' themes. By now, the 'obvious romantic relationships' of these ad-couples bother me a lot less than the fact that you never see women who are over 30, anything but physically perfect, or anything over a size 4 anymore. You don't see many older women (unless they've undergone a shitload of cosmetic surgery to look younger), any woman with facial scarring or a large nose or imperfect teeth or any kind of facial blemish, and you only see plus-sized women in diet company/drug commercials. You don't even see plus-sized models showing clothing meant for plus-sized bodies - instead, they size-down the clothing and hire non-plus-sized models, which is bloody sick, as far as I'm concerned. Ad people, how about some freakin' physical diversity?!? We're finally seeing ads with gay couples and mixed-race couples... so how about some normal-looking, non-model people? Regular folk. People who are short, or fat, or have wrinkles or scars? People who look average. Ads bug me on so many levels... it isn't even the heteronormativity and romance-expectations that flick on the raw anymore.

Born in 1976. I'm 40.