#so storytime with holly will probably happen more often

[klavery]

ok ive alluded 2 this b4 and i wanted 2 talk abt it 4 ace week so if anyones just dying 2 get in on an internet strangers Dramatic Queer Backstory im ready to overshare. its about my history with sex negativity and how its affected me.

so i grew up with an lgbt+ irl friend group of about 7 years. it sounds totally fake but for the love of god just trust me on this. Friend A was your typical anti-aspec, anti-mogai, anti-kink exclusionist with internalized homophobia and Friend B was a sex repulsed asexual. these two people were my best friends, we were all nd, we all liked fandom stuff, and we all found out we were lgbt+ together.

now with that context in mind, im letting you know right now that our relationship with eachother as lgbt+ people was utter hell. we werent CONSTANTLY at eachothers throats, but there had always been an air of uneasiness any time any topics about our identities or lgbt "issues" were brought up. there was no solidarity, and any support for eachother had always been one-sided. when tolerance HAD failed us, it resulted in arguments and shade-throwing. and it was all fueled by tumblr funnieman internet discourse brain poison. i was unable to feel pride within the presence of these two people, and the damage this did to me as an aspec person alone is a post all on its own.

these two friends, as you can imagine, were also very sex negative people. as was i. for me it was from a weird mixture of repulsion, and repression. but the nuances of my mess of an identity is, again, an essay for another time. but anyways, my own issues combined with both Friend A's internalized homophobia and Friend B's repulsion lead to us being neck deep in a miserable cycle of both sex and kink shaming, of either people we knew or people on the internet, amongst ourselves (i guess this was the one thing we could all agree on. isnt that just swell). this had been disastrous for my self esteem as someone who, later realized, wasnt "as asexual" as they thought, for lack of a better phrase.

i cant begin to describe how psychologically damaged this behavior has left me. to be stuck in such a toxic, harmful mindset during such a crucial period of development, between the ages of 13-20 years old. that i still struggle immensely to unlearn. it feels permanently ingrained in my subconscious, its just completely automatic to react with disgust or anger towards anything sexual. i always thought myself to be the perverted freak of the group, because of what i only relatively recently realized was actually normal human behavior all along. but the guilt of simply having any sexual thought continues to eat me alive to this day. and i must reiterate, the shaming wasnt just from my friends. i take just as much responsibility for the harm i caused. and i dont doubt my old friends are also just as fucked up from it as i am. i dont want to blame them for what happened. there is a part of me that wants to be angry, but thats mostly at the exclusionist shit. which i, big shocker, also had a hand in as well. funny how that works. its just. sad it had to be this way. this month is the 4 year mark of when i finally stopped talking to them for good. and i can only hope theyve grown up and gotten better.