#recording this in the dorm on valentines day is so embarrassing people can hear me through the walls

[arthur-r]

lyrics: i love you loyal like a dog / to breathe your air is quite enough / i follow brightly at your whim / my eyes are wide, i keep a grin / “good boy!” do i deserve a treat? / begging for love, i’m sickly sweet / it’s hard to love a broken dog / better to take advantage of / i’m whining, kicking up the dirt / it’s no secret this doesn’t work / i’m barking, cannot lay to rest / i’m not a lover, i’m just your pest / sincerity is nothing when it’s mangled in my growls and whimpers!! / ferociously in love just means i’m rolling helpless in the dirt!! / if blind obsession’s what you want, i’m burrowed in you like a splinter!! / but if you’re looking for an equal minded partner this is going to hurt!! / cause going through devotion doesnt mean that this is going to work!!

this is a song i wrote almost a week before my partner broke up with me when i thought that i was the problem and that i just don’t know how to be in a healthy relationship. turns out the relationship was not healthy but hey the message of the song still stands shdhdf i get overly attached and embarrass myself and here i wrote a song about it.

[greyliliy]

You know what? It’s the end of the year. Let’s have a giant personal confessional I’ll probably regret later because I’m oversensitive and trying not to cry while reading this book.

But I haven’t been real with you guys in a while and I feel like getting it all out at once instead of putting it into a conversation with one person and burdening them with it, and who knows, maybe it’ll help someone younger who’s dealing with this stuff now.

So let’s get real & it’s under the cut if you wanna’ read it.

I’m reading a book called Torn by Justin Lee about being a gay christian growing up in the church and it’s sort of terrifying how easy it is to relate to (up to a point). Needless to say, it’s got me thinking about life, my own frustrations, and topics about sexuality that have been weighing particularly heavy on my mind this past year as I approach my mid 30′s.

The first part where he’s discussing that he realizes he’s not attracted to women and that fear that something’s broken in him, is a feeling I know that very, very well. And when he starts talking about how he started to notice guys instead, funny enough, that’s when I realized that I...didn’t experience that either, though I could still relate to his fear of admitting this to other people.

I can’t ever remember being sexually attracted to anyone, or at least I don’t think I have (it’s so hard to pinpoint what exactly sexual attraction is and the nightmare of figuring out if it’s happened or not--but then again, I feel like if I’d felt it, I probably wouldn’t be struggling to figure out if I had or not). I remember wanting to be around people, and to have relationships, but thinking back, I don’t think I experienced it the same way other teens did.

I mean, my first serious boyfriend dumped me because as he put it: "I think you just want to be friends.” Thinking back, I went out with him for a year and we never did anything more than hug, so I can see where he’s coming from.

At the time, I sure didn’t though. I really liked that boy. We went out on dates & did stuff for Valentines and I thought we were happy, but I never made any moves physically and neither did he  (at the time I was so happy we were on the same page, because I wasn’t ready, but I guess we weren’t as in sync as I thought) and well, I was informed later by a friend that getting dumped because I “just want to be friends” means “You didn’t put out, idiot, so he found a girl who would.” (They didn’t say the “idiot” part, but it was strongly implied by their tone).

I haven’t had a boyfriend since, because I realized that was part of dating and if I went out with boys they’d expect me to kiss and do things with them and I just...wasn’t ready for that. Dating became something I was terrified of; I couldn’t repeat that experience again. It wasn’t even until after college that I tried dating again, and I can count the number of them I’ve been on in my lifetime without using two hands.

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I was a little repulsed by guys touching me. Girls were fine, boys not. I think it was a little switch in my brain going “Girl touches are platonic so they’re fine, boy ones have sexual meaning so it’s not.” that meant any time I boy touched me I panicked.

And then college hit.

I kinda knew people were having sex in high school but no one talked to me about it. There was this understanding that I had no clue about anything to do with that subject and they liked to keep it that way.

In hindsight, it hit me how much they teased me about it. I was that person who asked once at a friend’s house “How do lesbians have sex?” and they giggled “They scissor.” while miming the motion with their fingers - I didn’t get the joke and thought they were entirely serious and just accepted that answer and tried to picture how that would work. Imagine my face years later when I saw an episode of a certain show that that quote came from and I died a little inside because “Oh. They were making fun of me.”

(I also found out years later pretty much everyone I knew were all convinced I was a closeted lesbian and waiting for me to just come out already, which makes that confrontation all the worse, somehow.)

But if I wasn’t getting teased about how little I knew, they just didn’t talk about it at all.

College was an entirely different matter because I frankly couldn’t avoid the topic if I wanted to. It was in my health class (one of my gen ed. classes ended up being half Sex Ed.), it was in the free condoms they handed out, it was in my major classes (a film class I was in had a long segment that took up most of the semester titled “Sex in film” and I ended up seeing a lot of rated r films and sex scenes I had avoided in high school just because I tended to watch animated films & pg-13 ones more than anything), and well, college kids have a lot of sex, I discovered.

On my first day of  freshman introduction week I ended up in a guy’s dorm who already had a “women I’ve slept with” chart on the wall that already had tick marks on it (I was there for all of five seconds while the person I was visiting got his things and we got out; I never saw any of them again the rest of the year). 

Culture shock is an understatement.

And all of it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it in high school when people talked about wanting other people that way, and I sure as heck didn’t get it in college. But I had convinced myself one day I would. I kept thinking: “One day, I’m gonna meet that one guy that makes me feel all this sexual tension I keep hearing about and then we’ll date, and fall in love, and get married, and it’ll be great.” That’s what people kept telling me. “When you meet the one, you’ll know.”

(For the record, it still hasn’t happened, or if it did, it wasn’t over a boy and I’m in deep, soul crushing denial about it.)

I never did find that dating scene but instead, I discovered Boys Love (”Yaoi” at the time.) At first, it was a really guilty thing because I grew up Christian--and still am--(another relatable thing in this book I’m reading; the fear of your own church) and it was “Sinful” but...the stories and art were so good, and I felt bewitched. I remember reading FAKE and seeing how much they loved each other and I don’t know, it was just. Good.

And it was safe. I didn’t have to think about my sexuality when it was only boys on the page. I wasn’t an issue, or a topic, or had any part in it. I was reading about other people and it was fictional which meant it wasn’t real so I didn’t have to feel guilty trying to fantasize about real people (something that still makes me feel really skeevy.)

This went on for a few years and BL was pretty much the only thing I read/watched/did anything with. My roommates knew me as that obsessed BL fangirl and loved to tease me (but also encouraged it; my one male roommate in my senior year apartment expected my “couple of the day” picture posted to his door & bought me doujinshi as gifts. Thinking back, I’m blessed and grateful no one gave me a hard time about it).

I eventually discovered the more graphic, erotic side of BL and that was an experience, because I liked it.

A lot.

This is embarrassing to admit, but the first time reading a couple of those more graphic stories I felt different, and weird in my own skin, and kinda awkward (it freaked me out at the time). I described the exact symptoms to my friend in an IM because I was confused and she laughed at me: “You’re turned on, idiot.” (Again, the idiot was strongly implied but not straight out said. Not that I noticed at the time.)

It was like a bomb dropped. That was what people felt when they talked about getting hot and bothered. That’s what the people in high school and college were talking about when someone touched them. I had a point of reference.

And it hit me that thinking  about a living, breathing person had never made me feel that way. Not even close.

That was the first time I felt really broken.

And that was when I got desperate to fix it.

In 2007 all of those feelings exploded into an art project I called “Shout it Out.” (It is my one and only Daily Deviation to this day), and that project is the only reason I can share all of this with you right now. Because in 2007 I wrote down every guilty thought, every embarrassing fact, and every thing I was ashamed of & proud of and at this point, there’s not much I can tell you that can top it.

And maybe also, I read the description and realized I should follow my own advice: 

Someone told me once, that she believed we make life hard for ourselves by keeping things bottled up inside. Whether it be due to shame, embarrassment, fear, pride or some other emotion we don't share the things that are on our hearts like we should. We wallow in them and never realize that everyone else feels the same way. Our conflicts, our dreams, and the things that make us who we are should be free to be spoken out loud.

It was a big deal for me at the time, and sometimes I wonder where all that courage went. I don’t feel the same way as I did then on a lot of the topics, but at the time, that’s where my mind and heart were.

Over half of the text is related to sex. Reading it now, it sounds like I was a lustful, sex-crazed twenty-something who struggled to keep myself from jumping everyone (”I want to have sex so bad it hurts...” to quote one of the lines).

But the truth is, while I was obsessed with sex in media (manga, BL, romance novels, health sites,) learning everything I could, I’m learning more and more that how I experienced an obsession with sex wasn’t how many other people experience it.

I was obsessed with reading everything I could about sex because I was desperate to relate to some of it. I had fantasies about sex and myself because I kept thinking that maybe it’d click one day (and boy did I try thinking about a lot of different scenarios desperate to find myself attracted to anything). But many of those thoughts ended up forced or ineffective. I kept trying anyway.

I wanted to feel normal.

(Though that sort of failed too, since most of those fantasies ended up being about girls, and myself wasn’t necessarily involved in the picture.)

I remember desperately wanting to have sex because I thought if I did that then I’d suddenly have a light pop on in my brain that goes “This is why everyone else loves it! This is what I’m missing!” I’d have sex and then I’d be normal and feel attraction like everyone else does because I’d know what it feels like.

In the end, my strong conviction of “No sex until marriage” won out (For the record, I’m still basically of the philosophy that sex outside of committed relationships is a bad idea), but I kept reading smut.

So much in fact, that it became an addiction and it was all I looked at or did. It wasn’t a healthy place for me, and I’d rather not go into exact details, even if this has been a rather detailed sharing session. But I can say that it got so bad that I had to remove myself from the subject entirely at one point and pretty much cut myself off from the BL Community cold turkey. If it was digital, I deleted it. If it was a fanfic site, I stopped visiting. No anime. No manga. No doujinshi. No nothing. My physical media was shoved in the closet (that was a lot of money I wasn’t just going to throw out) and called it a day.

Heck, part of the reason I try to avoid a lot of erotica works is just because it reminds me of those bad times. (And the funny side effect that I read so much of it at one point that now it’s kinda boring because I’ve seen just about all of it).

But as I’m sure you’ve seen from my fanfiction and books, I slowly found a path of moderation. I’m re-reading my old BL books that I’m taking out of the closet and remembering why I loved these stories and art, and just coming to terms with myself in general that BL & straight romance novels might be the only way I’ll experience those sorts of feelings toward another person.

It’s probably why I like the genre so much, while I’m reading I can pretend, and that’s good enough for me. I can write romance without having experienced it and that’s a win in my book.

The truth is, I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that while I’d love a spouse of some sort and who knows, maybe something still might happen yet if there’s someone out there willing to be patient and wait, I can admit that I just don’t experience attraction to other people.

If I could go back to a young me, I’d tell myself to learn more when I’m younger so I didn’t feel so stupid when I was older.

I’d tell myself that it’s okay that I didn’t like anybody and that I didn’t have to feel obligated to find a boyfriend.

I’d tell myself that even if I’ll be struggling with trying to figure out myself and my feelings for the rest of my life, that it’ll be okay.

I’d tell myself that I’m not broken.

So on this last day of 2017, before I go back to reading my book and the rest of things I was going to do to day, I’m going to find a little bit of that courage I used to have in 2007 and just say now what I wish I’d known ten years ago.

I do also get the irony that I’ve sort of indirectly been admitting to it for a while now, but this is me saying it:

I’m asexual.

See you all next year, and now if you don’t mind: I’ve got books to read, random things to reblog, and a comic to draw.