cyancat

i'm a teen too. i only realized i was aro when a friend started having feelings for me and while i thought i returned those feelings (and in one way, i guess i do? idk its complicated but it doesn't feel like it's quite in a romantic sense - more like a general 'love and care' for a close friend) i've kinda realized that their feelings are... pretty different from mine. i'm not necessarily opposed to a romantic relationship with them since i'm quite touch-starved so i kinda want the physical contact that goes into it? but i also don't see it as necessarily a romantic relationship so much as a close... for lack of better words, friendship. honestly tho,,, realizing i'm aro has been more distressing for me than anything else. i try not to think about it too much, but i've fallen so hard in love with the idea of being in love i guess? i mean, i've mostly made my peace with the fact that i'll never experience romantic feelings. or, more accurately, when i think about my relationship with said close friend, i realize that i feel satisfied/happy/content with what i currently feel? but romance is so idealized that there's just a part of me that wants to wallow over the fact that i'll never experience it (or at least not to the extent as others do). on the upside, i no longer spiral in attempting to convince myself that i absolutely have a crush on 'x' because that was shit i used to do for... some reason? much to my own consternation, i always wanted to be in love with someone. never managed truly managed though, but man was i living in that denial for a long time

Can't experience any intersectionality if at least one of those things you're too stuck in the closet to talk about/avoid like a wildfire IRL sweat. In all seriousness though, I'm from a place that definitely doesn't even know something like aromanticism exist. Everyone around me is also very white alsdjfl. There may be like a few Hispanic/Latino people but from where I live that just means the majority of them are conservative as well so... yeah, from what I can tell @ my college, the LGBTQ+ group there is mostly white people too.

this sounds like a bit of the "i'm bi so it doesn't matter if you're trans or not" thing that i occasionally see, that i see a lot more people lambast aslkdf. regardless, i do think i'm understanding what the discussion was about more, and honestly... it's kind of complicated since people should be allowed to change their orientation as they please - orientations are not fixed and they are allowed to fluctuate and change with your understanding. and since n-b people are so varied, there are some people who have a binary alignment, and there are some who don't. for those who don't have a binary alignment,,, honestly, the current orientation system has no fucking clue what to do with them. its a very binary system, and so n-b people have often been defined by whatever the heck their alignment is in discussions of if 'x' sexuality would be attracted to them. the fact that not all n-b people cannot fit within the current systems of orientations we have (or at least for the most popular types of attraction) is a given, and i do think when you attempt to funnel them into the traditional binary orientations anyway [when they have no binary alignment], you are basically hand-waving the fact that they are n-b askdjfklsd,,, the way modern bisexuality/romanticism (is that the right term? -sexual/-sexuality :: -romantic/-romanticism, no clue) is defined today feels like a bit of a patch. me, having quite comfortably sat as 'pan' for the past century, i've definitely heard a lot about bi vs pan erasure which i am not getting into, but needless to say, one of the points is that being bi doesn't mean that you're attracted to "both genders" as its been described, but that you're attracted to at least two genders. and obviously, that exists to serve n-b people who aren't necessarily aligned with any of the binary genders. (since, a lot of sexualities n stuff have been updated/clarified/whatever to include n-b people of the same alignment.) [as an interlude, this is honestly so hecking funny to me, as an asexual person, that i have become so invested in the sexuality mcmamebbsdjfka horse race. that's not meant to imply anything, just a momentary lapse of amusement to me.] of course, you can immediately see the murky area with that and how it correlates to gay and straight people who might find themselves attracted to n-b people who aren't necessarily aligned? and... that's honestly not an area i can speculate about for obvious reasons, nor do i really feel comfortably implying anything since i... well, no experience, really, so it's not within my right to do so. i mean, if someone is aligned to a binary and you change your sexuality on that basis, then there's something problematic there, though i'd say that's more in the realm of 'definitional hijinks and misunderstandings' - altho, of course, that doesn't change that it can feel really invalidating, but regardless off topic thats a tangent, bisexuality is a bit of a patch to the n-b conundrum. and... it does work i guess? it can? but obviously there's something a bit... uncomfortable feeling with that being the way non-aligned n-b people are handled. like, what the heck do non-aligned people do. just sit on a throne looking pretty?? alksfdjkls,,, tho that would be very valid if they did and i would like a seat as well but aside from that, it does almost feel like being relegated to the 'other' (which may or may not be why i'm starting to have Issues with the widespread usage of n-b mmmm still contemplating that tho i'll get back if i ever come to a decision about how helpful the term n-b really is given how it seems to be consistently misunderstood to the detriment of people outside the binary). i mean, to be clear, i don't mean ill about attempts to make bi a more inclusive label, or of bi people, or the label itself. it's just that it really does feel like a patch rather than realizing that a system designed on the binary genders cannot in its nature be patched to be truly inclusive to n-b people, especially those with no binary alignment. all of that is to say, the issue is fundamentally the system that we have in place. of course, it's a lot easier to see the faults of a system when you experience its mmmdsfthatfeelzbadz than how to fix one. but i mean, i think a start is the way we see n-b people. if it is ever broken down, it's like by your alignment or some shit? asdjgklsd i have no way of aligning my 'mmmm i'm not any of this shit but idk what i am a fairy?' gender floating in my head that likes to dance around (especially whenever i don't feel within my own body, but i still... feel something connecting? doesn't make sense, i live my life trying to not understand it). but i... dunno if its really right to say that if someone has an instance where they are attracted to a n-b person w no binary alignment, they are actually allotropo/cetero/bisexual/what have you. since um... this is just me but part of the reason i chose to call myself pan was because i was lowkey intimated by the bi community. not like. it. just, the concept of it alsdkjf. so imagine there might be a sense of community and belonging that you're kinda uprooting and that's not really fair? i suppose the thing there is that you kinda just have to tune to the fact that sexual attraction can be a bit of a slider of sorts, and maybe there will be outliers, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily wrong about their orientation? or maybe they can decide to change it. i don't know. people will have their own preferences of doing things i guess. but then, literally all of that is also colored by the fact that i stared at the whole sexual/romantic orientation stuff and kinda noped the heck outta there. so i mean that's certainly gonna affect what i'm saying, but also i don't know if that would practically invalidate a lot of what i'm saying because if i'm speaking of my experience of things, i'm probably gonna feel othered either way, especially since for the longest hecking time i didn't feel i could be aro or ace, but i had no hecking clue what else to call myself. i've thought to death about this subject because i was a n-b person horribly and utterly lost in the system of attraction that we have, but i was horribly lost because i could not pin down any feelings like someone chasing after a ghost alsfjkds so, uh... i just wrote 1k of very pretty words so heck if i'm actually deleting all of that because i dunno if my voice means anything or not. mmjklfjklafljs. i'm just gonna call this as a,,, lowkey rant/vent thing of my frustrations with trying to figure this stuff out and a further attempt to figure things out when i don't even know where exactly to start. (p.s., none of this is even accounting for genderfluid people so ... ndklmcdkld;a;; rip me forgetting me, myself, and i exist u.u)

just gonna pipe in and point out that n-b isn't a gender. it's an umbrella term. n-b just refers to people outside of the binary, which can mean anything. it's like having the entire rainbow at your disposal instead of two colors. it's basically checking off the 'other' box. the thing that defines you is being the 'other.' the only thing it says about you is that you are not listed above. it doesn't say anything else about you. if you want to use it as your catch-all "i'm attracted to all these people," sure, but just understand & keep in mind that n-b people are not just diverse in the sense "oh all people are unique," but diverse in the sense that "they're a ton of genders all summed up as n-b for the purposes of naming what's other".

Acting

this is definitely something i can relate to. i generally don't care about my pronouns? except she/her. under no circumstances do i want to be called she/her. even when my gendered brain be like "she/her," stress-mc-stress-response won't allow it. that's not a dysphoria thing, that's just my brain having come to associate those pronouns with high stress. (and honestly @ this point i've thought of myself so heavily in terms of we, he, they pronouns that it's kinda weird to suddenly be called 'she' alksjdfl.) but regardless, i've dealt with the other issues of like,,, dysphoria... mhm... do i have it, do i have enough of it - i can't truly relate to the intense levels of self-hate some people have for their bodies, so maybe i don't experience dysphoria and while that doesn't necessarily mean i'm not trans, does that make me less valid? obviously no, but that's how medicalism will treat you. i don't even know if i necessarily experience anything as high as 'gender euphoria.' or maybe i do, it's just that i'll never reach a point where i can achieve said gender euphoria thanks to those weird gender-y thinger-y maheckeries going in my brain that are different from the standard gender binary. that being said, i wonder if maybe the way my dysphoria is expressed is through more of a general... apathetic neglect? because i absolutely neglect my body. i just... don't care about it. i think i kinda... idk, i usually go through life feeling some detachment from my body. it may also just be a response to my sister, who is the opposite - really obsessed about being clean - and i may have developed something against that because of her. of course, it could also stem from the fact that i can't stand things on my body thanks to sensory stuff alsjdfkl,,, well, regardless of the reason, i've never felt particularly in-tune with the "female" side of things. maybe i am faking being trans or something, but gender expression is a journey anyway. if i went back, i'd feel incredibly uncomfortable, so for now i'm sticking with where i am at. if, in the future, i realize that i'm not trans, that doesn't make the things i felt any less valid, just that my understanding or feelings have changed - y'know, like how most human beings operate alskdflj.

i tend to float in the... genderfluid, -flux, fluidflux area. at the start, i associated pronouns = gender which is a huge fallacy but alas it was the stuff my brain got up to, and lemme tell ya, every other hour i was changing my pronouns because they would sound okay, and then they wouldn't. it didn't help that i was fixating real bad on 'em. when i finally got my brain to settle down tho, my pronoun changes became less frequent (tho more bc pronouns just... don't come up that often in my life??). that being said, now i tend to experience this shift between agender, adrogynous, transmasc, and male identity? (there's a bit more, but i don't really know how to describe those so i won't.) it isn't something i necessarily notice all the time, it's just small things here and there, where i realize "huh, guess i'm feelin' more agender today." or it's behavior based, where i'm kinda gravitating more of a "masculine" feel? i don't always notice it, it just kinda happens. i sometimes use my pronouns as a general indicator abt what i'm feeling at, but pronouns =/= gender, so, eh, dunno.

query, what the heck do sites mean when they say "constantly thinking about your crush." like, how often are we talking about? because one of the biggest things that have gotta been a huge red flashing sign in my face is that whenever i thought i actually had a crush on someone, that niggling doubt of "but you don't actually really think a lot about this person" is something i just dismissed as, "oh well you know um... i think about this person... sometimes... kinda? idk its fine just go along w the narrative." and i... still don't know if this is normal for people where they don't think about their crush too frequently just sometimes or this is actually a flashing sign of "yeah hi hello thats not a crush, thats a you're-so-desperate-for-human-connection-that-you'll-pretend-to-be-in-love-with-just-about-anyone-friendly."

girl classmates asking me if i have a crush on someone. i say "eh, not really?" and they tell me to make up something. so i do. and i create a whole hecking fantasy about it base off all my feelings and behaviors around the idea that i have a crush on this boy. that i literally had no romantic thoughts toward and only had an intellectual admiration for until i was basically peer-pressured into having a crush. this is... basically how most of my crushes go. i decide on a whim i now have a crush on someone and so i "crush" (really, it's more squishing but whatever) on them until i get bored. also, the fact that the idea of being in a romantic relationship is... not my end goal really. i crave intimacy because i'm extremely touch-starved, but outside of that, i don't feel like there's anything special about a romantic relationship? i feel like i can be touchy and soft and dumb with someone without it necessarily being in the context of a romantic relationship. queer-platonic relationships just... click better for me. oh, but i'm extremely invested in other peoples' relationships because i'm honestly vicariously living through them. sexual/romantic attraction tend to be represented as these really good things i guess? so since i can't necessarily experience them myself (or at least not to the extent as others do), i feel like i'm constantly pursuing stuff about them because i feel like my life is so very unexciting in comparison. as such, i tend to be really disinterested in ace/aro stories? i really only care for the drama at this point i guess. that being said, when it comes to writing literally all my characters turn out dark shades of aroace whether i meant it or not - even when i'm very much trying to make two characters romantically/sexually attracted to each other. for the life of me. let me write a romantic couple dangit—alas, brain cannot comprehend despite the fact that i've read so many cheesy romantic stories at this point my brain is made of mush and more mush. this is... probably why i struggle to write romantic fluff. it's either angst or comedy because romance is like poison to me u.u also, love at first sight. what. the heck. is. that. can i eat it. is it edible. will it poison me if i eat it. yum, love at first sight, going down the gullet. whenever i read those "do you have a crush on this person" articles, i tend to have to stretch things and kinda... dismiss/reason them away? like, yeah sure i definitely experience these mmmm, or, eh, its an article can you really believe any of this stuff. it's fine i'm definitely in love definitely haha

as a general rule, i can't stand flippant touches due to repeated events causing a bit of trauma + a healthy dosing of my touch-starved butt having not touched someone in ten something years. in terms of intimacy, i definitely stiffen, on edge, not sure what the heck i'm supposed to do? i tend to reciprocate intimacy only because my general tactic of getting over things is forcibly exposing myself to it until i don't feel anxious anymore. which. generally does not work, but attempts are made. admittedly its also sometimes hard for me to tell whether i'm feeling butterflies or genuine discomfort? but given that i feel like crying when i think about it, i'd say intimacy just tends to be... too much sensory input for my brain. i don't think that's an aro-spec thing [for me] so much as that's just... brain very very unused to physical contact in any form whatsoever much less intimate contact. like scarf said though, i do feel like i could get used to it if its from someone i'm really close to/repeatedly physically affectionate with? but again, dunno if thats the aro/ace-spec going on or the "mmm trauma go brrrrr," although i feel more inclined toward the latter.

hi, yeah, i understand this absolutely. um... so a couple of years ago, i was in a pretty bad state of mind of suicidal ideation where i also didn't like. realize i was particularly suicidal? i eventually stopped getting those thoughts. well, less stopped and more - so i tend to experience depression in cycles. it's generally pretty mild? until i dip and suddenly i'm struggling to stay awake because i just want to sleep alsdjf;; and then sometimes - like you said - when i read/hear suicidal content n stuff it mucks with my brain and conjures all those lovely self-destructive thoughts that i've been repressing for the past couple years or i just completely nope outta there whether mentally or physically because i don't think i can deal with it. and like you said! it's not always consistent. sometimes i can be perfectly okay, other times i want to flip outta there right then and there. i think, though, other people's experiences may remind us of our own, and all the things we were feeling at the time. i can't say why some things may remind us more than others - sometimes there's no real rhyme or reason. sometimes i'm triggered by experiences that are pretty far away from my own, and yet i still feel that itch? regardless, it seems like a typical response, and is kinda why i tend to be pretty scarce on vent places, since i know it'll create some pretty nasty response feelings in me.

uh hi, i'm cyancat, shak, flippity boppity boop, it's the title, my brain is like... one braincell, i'm actually supposed to be writing for personal projects but that's not happening since instead my brain has decided to go on the "questioning your sexuality and everything you know to be true" route so here i am, after having indelibly mused my way into all lackings of sensibility and reason for a few hours now, i've gone and join both aven and this forum as a way of comforting my addled brain. hi, hello, yes, please excuse this rambling headache that is i. mhm... regardless, i'm sure i will be inundating these forums with my doubts and concerns about my romantic orientation as the person(s) i usually talk to are half the cause of my confusion, and i don''t want to potentially hurt them. i mean, i'm dense, but i'm not that dense. oh, one other thing, maybe i missed it, but what are the rules concerning swearing? i'm not a huge swear-er, but i do on occasion swear so i just want to make sure i won't be breaking any rules.