A couple weeks ago I decided to try to start talking about my mixed ace/non-ace QP relationship again. I then got bogged down with other stuff, but am now attempting to use my lunch break to do it anyway.
SO. For the folks who don’t know us, hi I’m Hawky, and I’m in a queerplatonic relationship/platonic life partnership/whatever we’re calling it this week relationship with B, who I often call the roomie, who is thebisfor here on tumblr, who will probably never use his tumblr to speak about QP relationships or anything to do with this. We’ve known each other for (ohgod) lots of years. Nine, I think. We’re well into our third year of living together. And we just got a house together.
Here’s what you get to know about me right now: I’m asexual, aromantic-spectrum (WTF-romantic), I’m chronically ill, disabled, currently twenty-four years old, and I’m with the she, her, etc pronouns.
The roomie is a dude, younger than me, not asexual, and we have never, ever, ever been romantically or sexually involved. We’re also not related. You’d be surprised how often people jump from ‘you’re dating’ to ‘oh you’re siblings’ sometimes. Like Luke and Leia wrote the book on hanging out.
Which sort of leads me to the first topic that I was offered up, by international-nerd; “How you manage your lives despite differences would be cool.”
Things I’m doing today:
- finish painting at least two complete rooms (living room and kitchen now only counting as one or maybe one half, bathrooms connected to bedrooms counting as parts of bedrooms)
- taking the brick with to do research on breaks
- taking my phone charger with me so I can continue to have indefinite internet
- eating something?
- maybe writing about my Enjolras feels, to be posted when I get home?
- maybe writing about being an asexual person in a non-sexual, committed, platonic relationship, aka queerplatonic relationship
ON THAT NOTE.
I’ve seen around tumblr that there’s interest in hearing more from folks that are in that sort of relationship. Well, I’ve been living with my roomie for three years now, we’ve known each other for around nine, and honestly… I don’t know what to talk about. However, I’ve been given the green light to share pretty much anything I want without even asking the roomie to read through first. Which gives me a lot of power, really.
So I’m gonna tag this. And I’d like to know.
What do you want me, a disabled, chronically ill, asexual, WTF-romantic chick in a long-term queerplatonic relationship with an awesome, non-ace dude who lives with me, what do you want me to talk about? How we got here? How we survive despite our quite different lifestyles? Just what we do everyday? What, honestly, because I’m willing to write I just don’t know what about?
I’m putting together the horrible House clips for an Ace 201 level presentation. This is worse than watching the episode the first time, when I got to sit through the main plot between cringing and nausea.
I already have a clip from Huge, and Shortland Street’s next on my list (saving best/easiest/longest for last). Anyone got other shows, movies, cartoons, anime, etc recommendations where asexuality is explicitly mentioned? Does this mean I have them all?
Never mind! Nausea unnecessary.
They accept “everybody within the LGBT community and its allies” to have meetings there and I will TAKE THAT. Thank you. Yes. You are perfect for bus access and don’t have ridiculously expensive parking fines for impossible to navigate parking. You are my new favorite people. NOW TO FIND A DATE/TIME OF MONTH/TIME THAT WORKS.
KC area aces, I know I got a few of you following me, maybe some folks I know you guys got school and all. Any preferences?
Sad news: Hiatus for KC Ace Space
I’m putting the Kansas City Ace Space in hiatus for the summer, largely due to a gigantic upheaval in my personal life that means I have no spoons to organize an entirely new group right now.
If someone else wants to help me organize, please feel free to drop me an ask. Otherwise, I’ll probably try again sometime in late July/August.
Sorry, guys. I’m really disappointed in myself on this one.
TW, ‘politely’ anti-ace bullshit? Unsure.
I’m including my email to him out of pure attempt at fairness. There are some other things I’d like to add, though. For one, I very obliquely and politely reference MANY bingo card questions in my email. Many. I won’t get into the list right now. It’s long, and the point of this post is the emails. Let’s say, he was bringing up my asexuality in every single session, and prying into and questioning it from every angle. Prying into and questioning me about various forms of abuse, despite me telling him no, I had not experienced them, always in relation to or directly before or after asking about my asexuality. I left the first session incredibly upset, if hopeful, the second session crying, the third screaming, and the last completely numb and exhausted because I felt soattackedin each one.
Now, his email, and my choice to thus far not respond to it, are haunting me. So I’m sticking it on tumblr to try for some closure that way, or to get up the nerve to email him after all, I don’t know. The line that sticks with me the most?
[…] unlike my friends and other clients who identify as asexual, you are also dealing with some combined physiological problems, hence the reason to make sure that all of the bases are covered.
And, in an effort to make full disclosure on my side, I have fibromyalgia that caused me to drop out of school due to pain and fatigue, and severe chronic anxiety, especially social anxiety. Ironically, that anxiety currently makes it almost impossible to write emails, make phone calls, or even post my own words or opinions on tumblr. So lookit me, posting on tumblr. So what now, tumblr? What now?
the girl and her dog: cassket: Common Myths about Sexuality and DisabilityThere are many...
Common Myths about Sexuality and Disability
There are many common myths about sexuality and disability. Most start with the biggest myth of all, which is that people with disabilities are all the same, and that you can talk about them as one single group. This is completely…
An interesting article, even though it has some rather massive flaws (assumption that everyone is sexual and has ‘a sexuality’).
But then, I’m asexual, I experience no sexual attraction, and I also happen to have no discernible sex drive to speak of, but the very same things in this article are coming back to bite me in the butt right now ANYWAY in a pretty relevant to my life way. My ex-therapist was extremely into my business about my asexuality, and the way that he justified that (despite ‘having asexual friends’) was because, unlike his friends, I have ‘combined physiological problems.’ Aka I deal with chronic illness.
So now we have the incredibly damaging and wrong myth that disabled and chronically ill people have no sexuality feeding into the horribly damaging and wrong myth that asexuality is a ‘symptom’ or a sign that a person is broken in some way, then looping right back around to cycle through the mess all over again.
It’s the most ridiculous thing, and it’s not something I’m seeing come up much in the ace community outside of mentioning trouble with the mental health profession in a more generalized form. Am I somehow the only one dealing with this? I sincerely doubt it. So what? Am I looking in the wrong places? I have to be.
So I’m tired, bored, and angry that my most recent therapist’s email obviously got so far under my skin.
Like, the anger and anxiety are rushing so hard I don’t know when I’ll go to bed, never mind sleep. It’s been weeks now, I’m doing awesome things, I was not wrong, why can’t I put this behind me. I’m angry, and humiliated, and so frustrated that I didn’t choose to reply and fight him more. So angry at myself for being too anxious to do it.
Shall I put our email exchange on tumblr to be seen and picked at? I mean, I even have images with blacked out names already. My adrenaline’s high enough I can just about manage it.
I do a lot of Ace 101 presentations these days. In fact, I spent part of today confirming that I would be speaking at a local LGBTQIAetc conference (yay!) on the subject. But I can’t help feeling like I should apologize for it, to the rest of the ace community, because sometimes I get up there in front of people, not as just a twenty-three year-old asexual with a mohawk almost down to her ass (though I do that too), but as a twenty-three year-old asexual with a mohawk almost down to her ass and a cane in her hand, who dropped out of school and doesn’t have a job ‘because of health reasons.’ And I feel like I’m reinforcing the idea that we’re broken.
Which is really messed up, and I realize it, but I’m sorry anyway.
I just emailed my therapist to tell him that I can no longer use his services.
I did so by offering to do a presentation for him and other therapists on asexuality and what is and is not okay to say to aces as their therapist.
Because that is what I was spending over half my time in each session doing. (I was spending a lot of the rest of it trying to get it across that I do not have a dark past in the way he was convinced I did and that it’s not my job as a GSM patient to educate him on asexuality. Even if he knows I do a lot of awareness work and presentations elsewhere.)
Safe space my ever-loving ASS. I should not have to explain how not okay it is to pathologize and invalidate my identity to you, sir. You claim to know better. (Hormones? Anxiety-caused? Abuse? Abuse? Abuse x 5? By the fourth session I had a fucking bingo, no joke.) I should not have to explain how it is NOT OKAY to, after realizing you messed up, say that you only messed up because I’m twenty-three and it would be okay to do this to a fourteen year-old.
I hope he takes me up on organizing that presentation. He’s supposedly trying to organize, educate, and promote LGBT+friendly therapists in the area. Granted, my personal emphasis is definitely within the ‘+’ there, but he kept asking me (and not really listening, apparently) about what the main problems were for aces seeking mental health services. I’d be happy to tell him. In a different venue.
You are amazing for being able to take something like that and turn it into a ‘lets educate some people’.
Aw, thanks! I wish I’d stayed so amazing after his incredibly, incredibly horrible response email. After about a week of going back and forth on whether or not to reply, I ended up just deleting it. It was just so incredibly offensive and upsetting. All ‘I’m sorry you’re offended, I have asexual friends, of course you’re not educating me, I already know about this, but you have a physical illness so of course you’re different’ and ugh even more than that. :/ I’m not certain I won’t regret not continuing to hash it out with him, but I just can’t do it right now.
