somequeerishramblings

[somequeerishramblings]

New achievement unlocked: I came out to a friend and they are now having a queer crisis because they related to what I said.

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Here is a complete list of the people who can decide if someone is LGBTQ+:

1. The person themselves

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Started bingeing watching fantasy high

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reblog if you fully and intentionally are referring to aspec people as well when you use the word queer to refer to the community

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You choose how vague or specific you want your labels to be (assuming you want to use them at all). Some people find it more freeing or useful to go one way, others are the opposite. It's all about what works for you.

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“You will never have to question my loyalty.”

— Unknown

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If I ever respond to you w just a heart emoji it's not meant to be dismissive. I'm bumping my shoulder against yours bc I like you. I am blinking slowly at you like a cat.

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not me doing mental gymnastics to turn every love song I listen to into a ballad about platonic love and friendship in my head like:

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platonic jealousy is very real, very intense and very very lethal.

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A love letter to my friends

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara // Seventeen, Kevin Abstract // The People You Will Fall In Love With In Your 20s, Ryan O’Connell // Yours Now, ATO // this post, @fairycosmos // For Good, Wicked  ​ // chalcedony, gentle.earth // Frog and Toad are Friends, Arnold Lobel // this tweet, Elvia Wilk

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baffles me how my favourite people don’t know how much i love them. “oh sorry we don’t have to do this if it’s boring” bitch please, i love looking at cute ceramic kitchenware if it’s with you

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I’d like to present to you a list of experiences (that society claims can only ever be romantic) which I’ve had with my friends, because platonic relationships are just as important as romantic relationships if not more so.

dancing in the kitchen at night in the light from the fridge (we listened to Rewrite the Stars and slow-danced in our pyjamas)

surprise visits (my friend drove over to my house after their shift at work to give me a hug after my exam didn’t go well)

looking after each other when sick (I used to keep extra painkillers in my bag for when my friend got headaches, my other friend always used to bring a spare hoodie because I feel the cold a lot, whenever we had colds we could bring each other our favourite snacks to share between classes)

baking together (I have a friend who is an absolute wizard at baking cookies. We made cookies at 1am and shared secrets while sitting against the oven door to keep warm)

forehead kisses (physical touch is one of my love languages to be fair but when I say goodbye to my friends who like hugs I always give them a forehead kiss too)

making each other playlists (i have a friend at uni so we don’t talk as much anymore but we always text each other a song each week that we think the other will enjoy)

watching the stars (when I first passed my driving test I drove into the middle of nowhere with my friend and we watched a meteor shower and saw the sunrise. we didn’t talk because sometimes silence is important too and there is comfort in just having someone there)

matching costumes (when we graduated high school my friends matched our costumes and went in animal onesies - we forgot a spare change of clothes and had to walk through town dressed as giraffes but it was funny)

going on a date (my friend and I didn’t have Valentine’s dates so we bought each other flowers and went to see a movie together)

holding hands (I have cold hands. my friend has warm hands. it’s simple science really)

picnic (we brought my dog too and my friend made fruit flapjacks and we watched the sunset)

surprise gifts (my friend brought me my favourite chocolate after my final exam)

New Year’s kiss (forehead kiss but it counts)

writing each other letters (we write each other letters on our birthdays including jokes, favourite memories, the future, the past, and everything in between)

I have many more examples but these are just a few. We’ve been taught to put so much emphasis on finding a romantic s/o that we sometimes forget we can experience love in so many other forms. And if you’ve never had any of these moments, don’t worry. You have plenty of time and someone out there is waiting for you to come into their life, be that romantically, platonically or some other way.

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fuck it *queerplatonics your ship*

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Okay, generally specific thoughts on sexuality because I’ve been watching all the queer shows that have come out recently, and calling myself the “straight friend” is starting to feel like a lie.

I’m gonna start with the types of attraction and how I feel about each of them:

Sexual attraction: this is something that I’ve understood about myself for a long time. I rarely experience sexual attraction, especially in the moment. I never look at a person and have sexual desires or wants in relation to that person. However, I do still experience sexual impulses, just not necessarily strong ones. I am definitely not interested in this type of physical intimacy with women, but would like an eventual physically intimate relationship with a man. A lot of it is contingent on emotional connection, which I will get to later.

Romantic attraction: once again, I have never really been the type of person to get crushes and can count the number of actual crushes I have experienced in 24 and a half years of life on one hand. I don’t feel romantic attraction when it comes to women, but do feel some when it comes to men. Every once in a while I will wonder at the idea of a relationship between me and a man, and the idea does excite me, but for the most part I don’t really think about it, and I definitely know many people who are way more romantically inclined than I am.

Now we come to my three favorites:

Physical attraction: this one was interesting to consider, since physical touch is way at the bottom of my love languages, and I sometimes have sensory issues related to slight neurodivergency that mean I don’t always like being touched. However, this is definitely something I’ve experienced. I have certain friends that I want hugs from, that I want to sit next to and cuddle on the couch, and who I hold hands with. This goes for guys or girls or nb/trans folks, where my desire to be physically close to that person has nothing to do with sexual desire or romantic desire, but I want to have physical contact with them. I don’t feel this way about all of my friends, and this is sometimes contingent on their love language being physical touch and my love for them as a friend meaning I want to show them that I care about them and resulting in wonderfully platonic snuggles.

Emotional attraction: possibly my favorite and the one I most relate to, I feel emotional attraction to all types of people. I thrive off of deep interpersonal connection, and having a tight knit group of people that I am emotionally close to is my favorite thing in the entire world. The people in this group do not have to fall into any other category of attraction to be in this one, but I find these relationships incredibly fulfilling and wonderful, and they are some of the most important relationships in my life, if not THE most important. Also, usually my sexual and romantic attraction is more likely to happen with someone I am already deeply emotionally attracted to. Again, though, my emotional attraction to a person is completely separate from the previous types of attraction in almost every single way. This is a reason I relate to (but don’t know how much) the term “Queerplatonic” or “Quasiplatonic.” This also ties in a little to my physical attraction to some people who I’m extremely emotionally attracted to, where the combination creates this strange quasi relationship, where we aren’t romantically or sexually interested, but “just friends” is definitely not it.

Finally, aesthetic attraction: this one is easy for me. I am a visual artist, and I think that people are aesthetically pleasing, regardless of gender. For me this does not necessarily lead to sexual attraction, but I can honestly say that I find women, men, and trans/nb folks to be very aesthetically attractive. This is the extent to which I am able to relate to my wonderful bi, lesbian, pan, and etc friends when they talk about their attraction to whichever gender. I can understand the aesthetic attraction, but may lack the romantic and/or sexual attraction. But I do understand romantic and sexual attraction, so their attraction to people I am not attracted to makes sense.

Me vs. Labels

Now, reading this it may seem clear that there are some labels and umbrella categories that I could fall under (A-spec, asexual, demi/graysexual, aromantic, demi/grayromantic, queer/quasiplatonic), however, after research and personal life experience, I don’t really like the labels. For all that I have defined myself as a cis/het woman for the last 24 years, even that label doesn’t fully fit the way that I am. And as freeing as it has been for my friends and family members to discover a label that describes at least some part of their experience, I am not experiencing that. I don’t want to put myself into boxes with words on them that don’t accurately describe who I am or how I feel about things. Labels can be freeing, but they can also be limiting. Calling myself “the straight friend” feels like a lie, because I don’t experience a heteronormative existence. But I’ve been that friend for so long that even when I talk to my A-spec friends about it, it’s almost like I’m still on the outside of the equation. Because I’m not labeled, I don’t count.

This is something that I’ve only more recently begun to struggle with, despite knowing these things about myself for several years. I’d had conversations with one of my extremely queer siblings about it not long after they came out as a-spec, bi, and gender queer to me. For them, having labels and pronouns and all of those things was freeing, and changed their life for the better. But whenever I think about putting a label on myself, or even multiple labels to try to capture nuance, I get stressed. I don’t like it. I love language, I love words, I want to be a writer. But words are limited. They cannot fully capture what it is to be a person. I don’t want to be defined by words on a box, because who I am and how I exist is much deeper than that.