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19thcenturyedgelord · 3 years

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TW: Transphobia, Homophobia, abuse, neglect, p3dophilia, s3xual assault, su!cide, alcohol

~Vent~

My mother is constantly saying that they is only two gender and is always dead naming me, the one time I get her to say my preferred name she rolls her eyes and scoffs as she says it.

My mother has told me my whole life that she owns me and that I don't get to make any decisions for myself, she was dressing me until I was disowned at 14.

My mother would threaten to k!ll herself is I ever did something she didn't like, this includes: having a panic attack, dealing with over stimulation, trying to dress myself, telling her to stop walking in on me while I was showering/changing, going to bed early, going to bed late, saying I was hungry, asking to be allowed to go outside, wearing my headphones, not being strictly christian/not eating kosher, ect.

My mother got rid of my pet hermit crabs without telling me and was constantly trying to release my turtles even though they would die in the wild and they were being taken care of very well with a large, clean tank and plenty of food and hiding places, a special light that was good for their shell, and a great water to land ratio.

My mother slut shamed me because I was wearing shorts that went above my knees (they were perfectly appropriate btw).

My mother would scream at me for hours if I got anything less than a 100% on a test and even if I did get a 100% she would ask me why I didn't get any extra credit even if there was none available and even if I'd did get extra credit she would ask why I didn't get MORE extra credit.

While I lived with my mother I had a diet of nothing but microwave meals and chips and chips because she spent all of her money on vape, cigarettes, and alcohol. I would constantly be near unconsciousness due to my low blood sugar because I had nothing to eat.

She has slapped me across the face multiple times, one time with sharp plastic that cut my chin, she did this as a punishment. One time she slapped me because my blood sugar was low and I was grumpy, this is how it went down:

Me: Hey I know you wanna talk right now but can I make some food first my blood sugar is low this should take me 20 minutes max"

Her: No, I'm you mother and your going to talk to me right now

Me: Can I please just get something to eat

Her: *yells at me wich causes me to get distracted*

Me: *spills uncooked mac&cheese because distracted*

Her: *yells at me then slaps me across the face*

My mother nearly beat me to unconsciousness because she was very drunk, I had bruises all over me the next morning but I was to afraid to say anything because I new she would scream at me and hurt me more.

She molested me daily, forced me to change in front of her, forcefully spooned me in bed for hours even after I said no, and would "playfully" spank me.

She was constantly talking about how sexy a 17 year old at her work was and even bought him vape. She would also talk about some of my friends like that and even tried to internet stalk two of them, we are all minors.

She would lock the door to the apartment and wouldn't give me a key and would force me to wait outside in knee deep snow for hours without any warm clothing because she stole it all. She also refused to drive me to school in -8 degree (f) weather because she didn't want to loose her parking spot. I was also forced to bike to and from band practice (with she forced me to to do because she wanted to live through me) in 30 degree (f) with heavy rain because she didn't want to loose her parking spot.

She would consistently make fun of me for reading or doing anything that I enjoyed because I was a "nerd" and a "looser"

She disowned me after she stole my phone, went through it and found out I was a lesbian.

I couldn't even go into my yard without telling her where I was going, if I didn't tell her I would be screamed at and not allowed out my room, for a day and then not allowed out of the house for two more weeks.

She routinely went through my phone and my belongings without my permission, knowledge, or consent, in case I had anything "suspicious".

I tried moving in with my dad and she sued him.

She stole my most prized pokemon cards, a bag, most of my clothes, all of my old toys, and over $200 from my in the span of two weeks.

My room didn't have a door and she positioned herself so that she had to go through my room to get anywhere else in the house.

She would frequently lock the bathroom door so that it was only accessable from her room.

I told her I like pop music and she called me a failure then continued to play her extremely s3xual, vulgar, music about dr*gs, alcohol, and r@pe.

From the time I was 8 she tried to force me to drink alcohol because its "cool"

She forcefully pushed me against a wall because I refused to give her a hug after she made an offensive joke and I called her out for it.

She screamed at me because I corrected her after she misgendered me.

I had to learn morse code just so I could speak to my friends without her knowing what I was saying.

When I started counseling because I wanted to k!ll myself and because I was having upwards and 15-25 panic attacks per day, she forced me to tell her everything that happened in counseling even if I didn't want to.

She always gangs up on me in fights but if I try to get back up she just yells at me more.

She refused to take me to the hospital when I had a concussion and forced me to go to school all week even though I could barely stand or speak and now I have verbal and motor tics which she makes fun of.

She would scream at me because I sit down in the shower even though I have arthritis. (Yes I have arthritis at 15, it runs in the family and before to long I might develop psoriasis, I have shitty genes)

I wasn't allowed to wear anything that revealed my shoulders, that was low cut, shower any part of my stomach or back, short that went above my knees, ect.

I wasn't allowed to get my hair cut below my chin because it " wasn't feminine enough"

I wasn't allowed to have anything that was "for boys" this included clothes, toys, books, stickers, blankets, posters, movies, ect.

She forced me to watch R rated movies with her even if I didn't feel comfortable watching them.

I wasn't allowed to have any friends over and I wasn't allowed to go to any friends house, the one time I did have friends over she judged all of them and tried me to stop hanging out with them after they left. My friends are all very good people and are the only reason I'm still alive rn, she was just mad that I was talking to people who weren't her.

She screamed at she because I got one (1) drop of dark green ink on her black coffee table that she got for free.

I wasn't allowed to draw any male characters because she was afraid I would get off to them or something idk (this was before I was forcefully outed)

She bought me a triple chocolate cake for my birthday once. I'm allergic to chocolate. She forgot my birthday the next year.

Anytime I would tell her about the terrible bullying that was going on she would tell me to get over it, even after I had been thrown to the ground and strangled by one of my classmates.

If I got into a new game or hobby she would either take it away or shame me for playing it.

She spent all day on the computer playing Sims 3 to the point where I had to feed myself, take care of myself, and play by myself as young as 5.

She screamed at me because while talking about Pokemon lore I mentioned how Arceus is the god of the Pokemon world and she said I shouldn't say that because it would "make god mad" ( I have nothing against christians or christianity btw, just the people who shove it down your throat like she does)

I wasn't allowed to eat or drink the last of anything (finishing a bag of chips, taking the last soda, ect.) If I did she would scream at me and slap me as punishment.

She threatened to forbid me form seeing my cousin (who for the first 11 years of my life was my only friend) if I ever "talked back" to her.

She wod frequently strangle me as a form of "tough love".

When I was 2 she tried to teach me how to swim by holding me under water over and over again, drowning is now one of my greatest fears. Luckily I did learn to swim with the help of cousin and granny and even enjoy swimming but it is hard for me to do things like wash my face in the shower or stay under water for more than a few seconds without panicking.

She never taught me how to cook but then would scream at me because I didn't know how to cook.

Her smoking inside and while driving has caused me to have some lung issues, she denies that she ever smoked near me.

She tried to take me away frome everyone in my life including my family and friends so that I could only spend time with her.

When I was in fifth grade she homeschooled me and forced me to do college lever reading, learn how to code, learn at least two other languages that weren't english, learn how to play guitar, do gymnastics, do jujitsu (japanese), do soccer, learn to sing (keep I mind I had no interest in music, but she did), do a digital homeschooling program set at a highschool level, and learn a bunch of useless skills like knot tying and making friendship bracelets because it was "feminine". This was in FIFTH FUCKING GRADE.

We didn't have a washer or dryer and she would never go to to town to get laundry done so I never had clean clothes.

If I had more that $10 I had to give the rest to her.

She tried to kidnap me once.

One time on accident I stood in a bull ant hill and got stung all over (if you don't know ants all sting at once), I was swollen all over and screaming in pain and she did nothing, not even give me ice or ointment, she just told me to be more careful.

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dystopiandilfs · 3 years

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I am never been so close to anti-stan then I am right now. Dreams Twitter fanbase started the biggest hate train on him because they themselves:

1. Took his inital tweet with the drugs comment as a race issue, like it was obvious that was not the intent or even the focus.

2. Got mad at his completely rational reply to a toxic Stan that used both white and adhd as an isult - the toxic Stan was saying his fanbase will dogpile them, well if you didn’t phrase your concerns in a toxic way in a public place maybe you wouldn’t be concerned about it. Like he empasised he had no intent to relate it to rap - and they see him say rap and fucking ran with it.

3. Got mad at him for disagreeing with someone generalizing his 23 million fans as anti-black, like even his stance on stans is entirely anti-generalizing, he literally denounced any that are in the same comment.

4. Bullied him into unprivating his account because they can’t share screenshots apparently.

5. Got mad a him for tweeting a fucking heart.

Then they turn around and blame the entire thing on the antis, like no. You blew it out of proportion and reacted like shit to everything he did. You are the problem. All the responses to his last tweet are “educate yourself and reflect” and “come back with a better apology” like no. He apologized when he shouldn’t have and you cyber bullied him. They are bloody proud of theirselves for “holding him accountable“ for something they misconstrued.

He needs to delete that stan video because they aren’t worth it.

First thing i want to say is that this post is going to be joint answered as evangeline is white so this is going to be answered by her and me as im half african half american. Normally evanageline would be voicing her opinions and adding ours in if we had any but as its a racism issue she didnt feel comfortable to voice only her opinions. However shes the one writing the post apart from this bit to keep up the consistentcy of the blog page. -Trinity (Basically Trin gave her thoughts using a voice note and I slightly edited it so the sentences were a bit more coherent and added both mine and the other admins opinions as Trin doesn't really use twitter unless it's through my priv account - Evangeline)

I will say that a lot of the fan drama that you see are a smaller group that is known to attack and harass Dream and anyone who disagrees with anything. Eventhough they are a small group they mass reply to everything and make themselves look bigger than they are. Not only that but the only thing they end up doing is overshadowing the original issue at hand which is fans harassing and being racist to eachother. So a lot of what I'm about to say is mainly what this group is doing and isn't at all a reflection of a lot of fans but it is something that needs to be talked about especially since a bunch of this groups members are either white or white passing but get mad on black people's behalf and is basically setting them up.

I don't mean to be rude or dismissive but a lot of people used this as an opportunity to trauma dump. Like I know going into horrible details about what you have to deal with is the only way to get the point across sometimes however harassing Dream and spamming him with stuff like "I was harassed because I'm gay" "I was doxxed because I was Asian" is lowkey weird. Like why are you telling this random guy on the internet that you were doxxed? What is he going to be able to do about it? Also not to defend Dream but how are you going to sit there and break one of his few boundaries whilst trying to educate him.

On top of that the issue was originally how racist some of the fandom are to black people but then other minority groups started talking about how they were also being stereotyped and attacked but all this is doing is talking over other minorities. For example a large group of fans started off talking about how they were being attacked by other stans because of their skin colour but then immediately started to harass and threaten others. Like some were clearly not being serious but dming people and update accounts to retweet and spread awareness isn't the move you think it is. Obviously a lot of them were genuinely trying to spread awareness and were trying to get the respect and treatment they deserve but all of that was being overshadowed by the few that were attacking and harassing creators and fans. Then a lot of it turned into minorites fighting each other over who was more oppressed which just makes the whole thing seem like petty drama.

I will say a lot of them were lovely. I am pretty uneducated on race based issues and how certain things effect people and can be racist so I was asking a lot of questions and most of them were nice. However I also got a lot of snarky ones like "google it" to questions that weren't general like "Is it mocking to call white people crackers and token white boy if you are a white person" or "is ______ considered micro aggressions"

However as usual it went from trying to educate your creators to who is the most oppressed and who can bring up more past drama that has already been addressed multiple times. I'm not being funny but the fact that some well known Dream antis were defending Dream and shitting on stans should really tell you how non productive this is. It went from "Hey Dream this comment is a bit weird can you delete it please" to "Dream you should stop being friends with this person and you should follow this person otherwise your racist" Like that's not helping anyone. The only thing that it's doing is breaking Dreams boundaries, setting Dream up and making stans look bad.

Like people were @ing Sapnap and George telling them to "collect the racist friend" like how is that spreading awareness. The whole thing went from being a good chance to educate to a big fucking joke that just made a lot of people upset and anxious.

Honestly the whole thing was pretty fucking hypocritical like you can't talk about being harassed whilst harassing people into hearing you out. A lot of the issues seemed really gatekeepy to me as well. One that I saw constantly get brought up was that the only people allowed to say dy*e were black lesbians as they created the word. Like a big topic was a misuse of aave but not a single person actual explained what it was or gave examples all I saw was "mcyttwt needs to stop using aave language it's offensive" like you can't claim to be educating people if you don't explain. Not everyone can access websites and caards that get linked because of regions or web rescrictions so they're not helpful either.

HOWEVER I will agree that a lot of their points were completely valid like the whole thing of "Feral Feb" over shadowing BHM and whenever Dream listens to rap people complain and call it bad music are two really good examples. I listened to a few twitter spaces to learn a bit more and things that were said in there was all good info that would be genuinely helpful to know and it really did help edcuate me however not a single tweet said any of it and that's why people don't understand what they're doing is wrong because nobody explains it.

A lot of the issues that people had with Dream were so weird as well like a lot of them were self oppression and turning normal things into racism. A lot of the issues had the same energy as the 404twt fans who were genuinely mad at Dream for having a colour that George couldn't see and they were harassing him and claiming that he was purposely excluding diasbilities.

Usually we would add more but Trinity got a bit upset and stressed so she had to stop answering various asks and the other admins are all white or white passing and don't feel like it's our place to put our own opinions. We will try to answer other asks with similar thoughts later - Evangeline

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hellomynameisbisexual · 3 years

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I’d go so far as to say that the nomination probably saved the site, in fact. For those who need a little background: despite being a small voluntary project the site was nominated for the 2014 Publication of the Year award by Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity, just nine months after its inception. This was a landmark step in Stonewall’s positive new direction on bi issues. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time Stonewall had specifically nominated a specifically bi publication or organisation for an award. At this point my co-founder, who was taking care of the business side of things, had recently jumped ship and I was seriously considering packing the whole thing in. I won’t lie, I was astonished to read the email.

I’d worked on a publication which won the award under my editorship a few years previously. Unlike Biscuit, however, g3 magazine – at the time one of the two leading print mags for lesbian and bi women in the UK – had an estimated readership of 140,000, had been going for eight years and boasted full-time paid office staff and regular paid freelancers. Biscuit, by contrast, was being dragged along by one weary unpaid editor and a bunch of unpaid writers who understandably, for the most part, couldn’t commit to regularly submitting work.

Little Biscuit’s enormous competition for the award consisted of Buzzfeed, Attitude.co.uk, iNewspaper and Property Week. We didn’t win – that accolade went to iNewspaper – but the nomination was nevertheless, as I say, a huge catalyst to continue with the site. I launched a crowdfunder, which finished way off target. I sold one ad space, for two months. Then nothing. I attempted in vain to recruit a sales manager but nobody wanted to work on commission. Some wonderful writers came and went. There were periods of tumbleweed when I frantically had to fill the site with my own writing, thereby completely defeating the object of providing a platform for a wide range of bi voices.

The Stonewall Award nomination persuaded me to keep going with the site

The departure of the webmaster was another blow. Thankfully by this point I had a co-editor on board – the amazing Libby – so I was persuaded to stick with it. And here we are now. I don’t actually know where the next article is coming from. That’s not a good feeling. But, apart from for Biscuit, I try not to write for free anymore myself, so I understand exactly why that is. As a freelance journo trying to make a living I’ve had to be strict with myself about that. I regularly post on the “Stop Working For Free” Facebook group and often feel a pang of misplaced guilt because I ask my writers to write for free, even though I’m working on the site for free myself, and losing valuable time I could be spending on looking for paid work.

Biscuit hasn’t exactly been a stranger to controversy, in addition to its financial and staffing issues. Its original tagline – “for girls who like girls and boys” – was considered cis-centric by some, leading to accusations that the site had some kind of trans/genderqueer*-phobic agenda. Which was amusing, as at the height of this a) we’d just had two articles about non-binary issues published and b) I was actually engaged to a genderqueer partner, a fact they were clearly unaware of. Now the site is under fire from various pansexual activists who object to the term “bisexual”. To clarify – “girl and boys” was supposed to imply a spectrum and, no, we don’t think “bi” applies only to an attraction to binary folk. The site aims the main part of its content at female-spectrum readers attracted to more than one gender because this group does have specific needs. But there is something here for EVERYONE bisexual. Anyway, it’s a shame all of this gossip was relayed secondhand, and the people in question didn’t think to confront me about it (which at least the pan activists have bothered to do). We damage our community immeasurably with these kinds of Chinese whispers.

Biscuit ed Libby, being amazing

Whilst trying to keep the site afloat, I’ve also been building on the work I started right back when I edited g3, and trying to improve bi visibility in other media outlets. I’ve recently had articles published by Cosmopolitan, SheWired, The F-Word, GayStar News and Women Make Waves and I’m constantly emailing other sites which I’ve not yet written for with bi pitches. Unfortunately, although I am over the moon to be writing for mainstream outlets such as Cosmo about bi issues, it’s been an uphill struggle trying to persuade some editors out there that they have more readers to whom bi-interest stories apply than they might think. It’s an incredibly exhausting and frustrating process.

Libby and I are doing our best with Biscuit. I can’t guarantee that I would be doing anything at all with it if Libby hadn’t arrived on the scene, so once again I would like to mention how fabulous she is. But we desperately need more writers. We need some help with site design and tech issues. We need a hand with the business and sales side of things. We can’t do it without you. And if you know any rich bisexual heiresses who read Biscuit, please do send them our way. 😉

Grant Denkinson’s story

denkinsonpanel

Grant speaks on a panel chaired by Biscuit’s Lottie at a Bi Visibility Day event

So first of all, explain a little about the activism you’re involved/have been involved in.  

“I’ve been involved with bisexual community organising for a bit over 20 years. Some has been within community: writing for and editing our national newsletter, organising events for bisexuals and helping others with their events by running workshop sessions or offering services such as 1st aid. I’ve spoken to the media about bisexuality and organised bi contingents at LGBT Pride events (sometimes just me in a bi T-shirt!). I’ve helped organise and participated in bi activist weekends and trainings. I’ve help train professionals about bisexuality. I’ve also piped up about bisexuality a lot when organising within wider LGBT and gender and sexuality and relationship diversity umbrellas. I’ve been a supportive bi person on-line and in person for other bi folks. I’ve been out and visibly bi for some time. I’ve helped fund bi activists to meet, publish and travel. I’ve funded advertising for bi events. I’ve set up companies and charities for or including bi people. I’ve personally supported other bi activists.”

 What made you get involved?

“ In some ways I was looking for a way to be outside the norm and to make a difference and coming out as bi gave me something to push against. I’ve been less down on myself when feeling attacked. I’ve also found the bi community very welcoming and where I can be myself and so wanted to organise with friends and to give others a similar experience. There weren’t too many others already doing everything better than I could.”

How do you feel about the state of bi activism worldwide (esp UK and USA) at the moment?

“There have been great changes for same-sex attracted people legally and socially and these have happened quickly. Bi people have been involved with making that happen and benefit from it. We can also be hidden by gay advances or actively erased. We still have bi people not knowing many or any other local bi people, not seeing other bisexuals in the mainstream or LGT worlds and not knowing or being able to access community things with other bis. We are little represented in books or the media and people don’t know about the books and zines and magazines already available. The internet has made it easy to find like-minded people but also limited privacy and I think is really fragmented and siloed. It is hard to find bisexuals who aren’t women actors, harmful or fucked up men or women in pornography designed for straight men. We have persistent and high quality bi events but they are sparse and small.”

What’s causing you to feel disillusioned?

“I’m fed up of bi things just not happening if I don’t do them. Not everything should be in my style and voice and I shouldn’t be doing it all. I and other activists campaign for bi people to be more OK and don’t take care of ourselves enough while doing so. People are so convinced we don’t exist they don’t bother with a simple search that would find us. We have little resources while having some of the worst outcomes of any group. I don’t want to spend my entire life being the one person who reminds people about bisexuals, including our so-called allies. I’m not impressed with the problem resolution skills in our communities and while we talk about being welcoming I’m not sure we’re very effective at it. I’m fed up with mouthing the very basics and never getting into depth about bi lives and being one who supports but who is not supported. I’m all for lowering barriers but at a certain point if people don’t actively want to do bi community volunteering it won’t happen. Some people are great critics but build little.”

What do you want to say to other activists about this?

“Why are we doing this personally? I’m not sure we know. How long will we hope rather than do? Honestly, are there so few who care? Alternatively should we stop the trying to do bi stuff and either do some self-analysis, be happy to accept being what we are now as a community, chill out and just let stuff happen or give up and go and do something else instead.”

Patrick Richards-Fink’s story

085d4de So first of all, explain a little about the activism you’re involved/have been involved in.

“Mostly internet – I am a Label Warrior, a theorist and educator. Here’s how I described it on my blog: “One of the reasons that I am a bisexual activist rather than a more general queer activist is because I see every day people just like me being told they don’t belong. It doesn’t mean I don’t work on the basic issues that we all struggle against — homophobia, heterosexism, classism, out-of-control oligarchy, racism, misogyny, this list in in no particular order and is by no means comprehensive. But I have found that I can be most effective if I focus, work towards understanding the deep issues that drive the problems that affect people who identify the same way that I have ever since I started to understand who I am. I find that I’m not a community organizer type of activist or a storm the capitol with a petition in one hand and a bullhorn in the other activist — I’m much better at poring over studies and writing long wall-o’-text articles and occasionally presenting what I’ve gleaned to groups of students until my voice is so hoarse that I can barely do more than croak.” So internet, and when I was still in school, a lot of on-campus stuff. Now I’m moving into a new phase where my activism is more subtle – I’m working as a therapist, and so my social justice lens informs my treatment, especially of bi and trans people.”

What made you get involved?

“I can’t not be.”

How do you feel about the state of bi activism worldwide (esp UK and USA) at the moment?

“I feel like we made a couple strides, and every time that happens the attacks renewed. I hionestly think the constant attempts to divide the bisexual community into ‘good pansexuals’ and ‘bad bisexuals’ and ‘holy no-labels’ is the thing that’s most likely to screw us.”

What’s causing you to feel disillusioned?  

“It is literally everywhere I turn – colleges redefining bisexuality on their LGBT Center pages, news articles quoting how ‘Bi=2 and pan=all therefore pan=better’, everybloodywhere I turn I see it every day. The word bi is being taken out of the names of organisations now, by the next group of up-and-comers who haven’t bothered to learn their history and understand that if you erase our past, you take away our present. Celebrities come out as No Label, wtf is that. Don’t they make kids read 1984 anymore? It’s gotten to the point now that even seeing the word pansexual in print triggers me. I’m reaching the point now that if someone really wants to be offended when all I am trying to do is welcome them on board, then I don’t have time for it.”

What do you want to say to other activists about this?

“Stay strong, and don’t give them a goddamned inch. I honestly think that the bi organizations – even, truth be told, the one I am with – are enabling this level of bullshit by attempting to be conciliatory, saying things that end up reinforcing the idea that bi and pan are separate communities. We try to be too careful not to offend anyone. Like the thing about Freddie Mercury. Gay people say ‘He was gay.’ Bi people say ‘Um, begging your pardon, good sirs and madams and gentlefolk of other genders, but Freddie was bi.’ And they respond ‘DON’T GIVE HIM A LABEL HE DIDN’T CLAIM WAAHHH WAAHHH!’ And yet… Freddie Mercury never used the label ‘gay’, but it’s OK when they do it. And he WAS bisexual by any measure you want to use. But we back down. And 2.5% of the bisexual population decides pansexual is a better word, and instead of educating them, we add ‘pan’ to our organisation names and descriptions. Now, this is clearly a dissenting view – I will always be part of a united front where my organization is concerned. But everyone knows how I feel, and I think it’s totally valid to be loyal and in dissent at the same time. Not exactly a typically American viewpoint, but everyone says I’d be a lot more at home in Britain than I am here anyway.”

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charlottemadison42 · 4 years

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On Good Omens and Faith

Here follow personal thoughts on what Good Omens has meant to me as an Exvangelical. There’s a lot of healing & hope here, but it gets a bit dark first, as worthy stories do.

CW: I wasn’t badly spiritually abused in church, but I’ll be discussing things that are spiritually abusive: purity culture, sexphobia, queerphobia, abortion, mild self-harm, failure to treat mental health appropriately, ableism -- plus the special ways church authority makes all of these especially hard.

I’m personally an atheist but this message is not an argument against faith itself, rather against the specific subculture I grew up in. If you are a person of faith you’re welcome here.

I grew up in the American Evangelical subculture of the 80′s and 90′s, in the Keith Green/DC Talk/Left Behind/Veggie Tales era. I got saved at a Carman concert in sixth grade, and re-pledged my faith just to be extra sure every year at summer camp and youth group retreats.

This upbringing is not unusual. Doesn’t make me special. But its effects were real.

I’m finally engaged in a reckoning with it, in the “I should maybe talk this over with a support group or therapist” sense. I was a worship leader and youth leader at a Vineyard church when I left my faith abruptly in 2007*. It took me ten years to tell my family and friends that I was an atheist. For that decade I didn’t think about it -- but when I confessed to my loved ones two years ago, the processing began in earnest.

If you came up Evangelical, you already know how literal our belief in angels and demons can be in certain strains of the church. Until I was 26, I believed they were real entities genuinely and invisibly at war all around me. The End Times were real and we were in them. The Antichrist was whatever high profile democrat could be weaponized at the moment, the Rapture was nigh, and Armageddon was imminent (which explained why tension kept building in the Middle East).

My church community regularly discussed friends and neighbors’ problems in the language of demon possession or harrassment: depression was a demon, addiction was a demon, promiscuity was a demon. I was part of casual and formal exorcisms and the occasional healing. No holy water, but there were hours of fervent prayers and tears, speaking in tongues and anointing with oil. It’s like a fever dream looking back at it now.**

Shout out to my other teens and tweens of the Frank Peretti era, forbidden from reading books of fantasy any later than Lewis or Tolkein -- Xanth was forbidden, Hogwarts was demonic. We were given instead (retrospectively) horrifying books about spiritual warfare, Christian takes on historical fiction, and end times fantasies. But they weren’t sold as fantasy to us, it was all real. Adults in positions of power confirmed it over and over. Narnia might be allegory but This Present Darkness supposedly illustrated spiritual truths.

I remember telling a trusted church teacher at age 10 or 11 that sometimes I would get scared at night, in the dark, and feel a palpable terror that kept me awake. They told me with no hint of comfort, “That means a demon is visiting you and sitting on your chest, trying to oppress you with fear so you will sin. Don’t wake your parents or read a book, instead you should pray or read only the Bible until the demon is compelled to leave, either by an angel or the presence of God.” This adult was affirmed by amens and mm-hmms.

I took this teaching to heart. I also understood, by implication, that if the bad feeling stayed with me then I was praying wrong -- that no angel would rescue me that night. I knew that my fear as it compounded in the dark was itself a sin that made God harder for me to reach.

These are not things that should be told to children.

Then there were the prophecies. (read more if this resonates with you, if not I’ll clip it here so I don’t take up your whole screen)

Anyone could prophesy in most churches I attended. Dreams were prophecies, visions were prophecies, vague feelings were prophecies. (That gave nightmares / being hormonal / being really hungry an awful lot of sway at Bible study.)

I had a woman prophesy over me weeping, with her hands buried in my hair, that she felt overwhelming grief for my future child. I was 23.

I have no child, and I harbored the secret at the time was that I didn’t want one -- a rebellion for me as a married woman. I feared she was prophesying an abortion in my future, and I was inconsolable for months at the damning choice that would visit me someday. (As of this writing at age 38 I’ve never been pregnant, for which I give all thanks to modern birth control.) I still wonder what happened to that woman’s child, or pregnancy, or perhaps her desire for a child, that this was her prophecy for me.

I heard much darker things prophesied over other people. I remember career changes (ill-advised) and marriages staying together (they shouldn’t have) and mission trips undertaken (that assuredly should not have been) because of prophesies.

Last, of course, I didn’t know it yet but I had many queer friends at the time. Some of them didn’t know it. We had no context in our small town -- and no corners of the internet to hide in and learn context, because the internet didn’t do much more than access our local library catalog at the time. I was told that demons sat on my chest to oppress me as a child, but I was shielded from understanding what a lesbian actually was until I was sixteen.

I remember feeling vaguely guilty when we prayed over this or that person in youth group, entreating God that they could resist their base urges. We prayed that they could choose a life of abstinence if they had to, rather than enter sexual sin and be cast out. I felt guilty but I still joined the circle to pray.

I’m sorry. I was wrong. Part of me knew it at the time. I wish I had listened to that part of me because that it was correct. There are fragments of my former faith I still treasure, but those prayers were rotten to the core.

Sidebar: Luckily that feeling of guilt bloomed quickly into rejecting queerphobic doctrine. By age 20 I decided I could only attend churches that did not preach homophobic takes on scripture from the pulpit, and that did not advocate/imply advocacy for any particular political party. The reason I mention this: if YOU are currently a person of faith in this position, uncomfortable with what you hear from your leadership, go find a church that’s queer-affirming, gives to the poor, and advocates for immigrants. Live in a conservative area? Create or join a home church. That’s what the early church looked like anyway. Don’t shrug off this responsibility. Shine a light.

Anyway. Several years later, I fell.

I had to step down from multiple church leadership positions in one day. My entire life changed in two months; marriage, job, home, friends, everything uprooted when I could no longer pretend to believe. I didn’t tell my family why everything fell apart, even as they let me crash their couches.

I had wanted to be a good believer. I read apologetics, the mystics, eschatology, theophostics. I taught and attended study groups, I took troubled teens out to coffee, I served the homeless, I waited til marriage. I was in church as many as thirty hours weekly. When I first felt my faith slipping I said “not yet,” and I read the entire Bible straight through twice, in different translations, while journaling through “My Utmost for His Highest.” Then, unsatisfied, I read and annotated the New Testament in interlinear Greek. I gave it my everything.

What could replace all that?

Time, it turns out. And freedom.

Freedom to not think about it was perhaps the kindest freedom. The constant labor of self-evaluation and thought policing that goes into Evangelical Christianity is exhausting. Letting it go of it felt like getting my mind back. Or owning it for the first time, since I never knew this freedom before. I had even been seeking counseling because I was hearing multiple voices in my head at once, all mine, often arguing. That problem vanished the hour I deconverted. I heard only one voice anymore, and it was my own.

For ten years I was free to just not think about it.

When I decided to remarry I realized that I didn’t want to explain to anyone why my ceremony would not include prayers or communion. So I told my loved ones at last that I was an atheist, a decade late. They received it graciously, and I’m sure they had known-but-not-acknowledged it for a long time. I hope they don’t worry about me or pray behind my back for my salvation. But if they do I can’t accept responsibility for it anymore.

Since that confession I’ve finally felt compelled to back at what all actually happened in church. It seemed so normal to me at the time. But wait, it wasn’t:

I exorcised people. I laid on hands for healings. I encouraged episodes of religious rapture, falling out, and speaking in tongues, and as a worship leader I knew the music cues to bring them about (yes, there are certain chord and tempo changes for that). I was present for prophecies that changed people’s lives and might have issued some myself, I don’t remember. I alienated people who didn’t fit in, whether because they were queer or just because they didn’t conform to church culture. I witnessed abuse and had no language to report it or even comprehend it. I hurt people. I was hurt.

I was told there were real demons in my room and I had to pray them away all by myself.

The work of undoing this mindf*ck (sorry friends of faith, that’s how it felt) suddenly turned urgent after being ignored for a decade. I can’t afford therapy, but thankfully Twitter chats and message boards and podcasts exist (thank you, @goodchristianfun and @exvangelical).

And then -- out of the blue -- along came my own personal angel and demon, along with Frances McDormand herself. I watched it on a whim. (Actually no, David Tennant’s hair made me.)

Apparently Good Omens had a few things to say directly to my mindf*cked subconscious:

1) Are you scared of demons in a pathological childhood trauma way? Here, have a helping of this amalgam of your favorite Doctor and scariest ever Marvel villain tearing it up as the demon Crowley.

2) Does your mild bookish personality and respect for the culture you grew up in keep you reflexively deferential to authority, even as it gaslights you and hurts others? Enjoy some Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

3) Are you stuck still mentally assigning a male gender to the god you always claimed was beyond gender? Boom, meet Her in all Her ineffable wisdom.

4) Are you terrified of the End Times, both as a Biblical horror of childhood and as an adult who reads the f*cking news? Let’s fantasize awhile about a solvable apocalypse (because what would that even look like, yo).

5) Do you keep reflexively binarizing good and evil? Still giving in to the temptation to characterize humans as righteous or fallen, especially celebrities and political prospects? Spend some time on Our Side with Adam, the utterly human Antichrist, as he makes choices that matter -- some goodish, some baddish, all with mixed consequences, because that’s what humans do.

6) Do you need more queer love stories in your life? Yes you do. Yes. YES. Here it is. The good stuff. Whether it’s gay, trans, genderfluid, asexual, agender, metaphysical, whatever (I’m enjoying reading all these takes and more on AO3) it’s a hell of a love story.

Good Omens was a f*cking revelation.

I’m not sure why the show hit me as hard as it did in the Exvangelical feels. It’s not that it’s a perfect show, but it was the right thing at the right time for me, and it brought a truck full of dynamite to the excavation I was just beginning with a trowel and a makeup brush. I finished watching ep 6 and thought “why do I feel like I’ll be thinking about this every single day for years?”

And then I looked down, and lo and behold I had an open chest wound -- inside of which I found the banished memory of a child trembling and praying in terror in a dark room.

There was a lot that I forgot about in the ten years it took me to hike away from Evangelical life. It all came rushing back.

I had forgotten the sweat and cries during exorcisms and the heat of laying on of hands. I had forgotten fits of ecstatic tears of self-hatred and self-denial so strong they were almost blissful, as I sang and chanted mantras like “I am nothing, You are everything.” I had forgotten giving away ten percent of my income until I was 26. I had forgotten the constant mental effort of Being A Proverbs 31 Woman, about submission and complementarianism and feeling responsible to guard the virtue of men by never tempting them. I had forgotten the pressure to not even masturbate before marriage and to become a sexual athlete the night after.

I had forgotten the hours and hours of daily prayers. Every phrase was carefully carved in language my superego ran by my doctrine, to make sure no hint of rebellion ever bled through. I washed words of need and doubt and frustration from my mind so they could never slip between me and my Heavenly Father. I didn’t just want to hide thoughts God wouldn’t like, I would have cut them out with violence if I knew how. As a result I picked and ticced and cut and exhibited symptoms of OCD.

It hurt to remember all of this at once during a BBC Amazon Prime miniseries. It confused me. It confused my spouse. I looked at all these feelings, exposed and piled in a massive dirty heap -- and I spotted the straps I used to haul it around with me for decades. Who knew I could carry all that? The weight of faith?

But I don’t have to pick it up again. I had a new story to help me frame my story. I felt equipped with a flaming sword to face my past and a new syntax to describe the old ideas I'm ready to let go of.

I got to recast Heaven and Hell. I was invited to ask myself whether a cozy cluttered bookshop doesn’t beat them both hands down.

I got to reimagine angels and demons, good and bad, intentions and consequences. I was invited to live in the reality that we’re all of us humans in between, and that I’m probably still overinvested in the value of Good and Bad as yardsticks.

I got to reimagine western history. The show’s perspective of history is very limited and Eurocentric, but it’s also the version of history I was taught at an early age, which made the story a useful lens to deconstruct what I learned before I knew much about critical thinking.

The opening of Episode 3 in particular f*cked me up. First Aziraphale lies to God and She vanishes, then Crowley starts poking holes in the story of the Flood, then at the Crucifixion -- I started breathing hard on my first viewing, experiencing a real physiological threat response. I was loving it, of course, but distressed panicky love.

The second time I watched it I realized what was happening: I was going back to Sunday School to revisit ideas I absorbed before I was fully sentient, and examining them in the light of fully formed adult secular morality. They look different from here.

When God withdraws Her presence from Aziraphale in the first few moments of Ep 3 as he prevaricates (well, lies) I remembered the one great fear of my faithful life: that I could sin a particular sin and as punishment I would be cut off from God’s presence. As a believer in the End Times, that meant the Rapture could occur at any moment and I might be rejected, be left behind to experience the Tribulation.

Now, from some remove, I realize that I always had one fear larger. It’s a thought I never allowed myself to entertain consciously. Good Omens unearthed it like a vein of flowing lava:

If the Apocalypse as my church describes it is real, how could God want it to happen? And if God does, is this a God I want to worship? If I don’t, but I’ll be damned for that, is my faith freely chosen?

Whose side could I really be on, in the End Times, if not Heaven’s or Hell’s?

These are not small questions.

I’m relieved that I answered them a long time ago for myself.

But even after the answering, there’s fallout; a million little knots to untie and ideas to unlearn. We all get to spend our lives doing this sort of archaeological dig through our childhood baggage, I suppose. My Stuff is certainly not unique. It’s just a lot. Same as everyone’s.

But once in awhile a story comes along and helps us with the process. A sharper spade, a better tool for the work. In my case, through Good Omens I received demolition-grade explosives. It gave me a framework, characters, and a personal shorthand to speed my own digging and contextualize what I find.

If your history is kinda like mine -- whether you’re still in the faith or not -- be sure to talk to someone about church stuff from your past. The weird stuff, the dark stuff, the things you did/people did to you that now seem “off.” Even if you’ve grown past the point of “mental illness requires an exorcism” there are still dangerous ideas buried like land mines in our moral matrices. Self-hatred, intolerance, fear of abandonment, fear that failure is damnation, presumption that “we’re” on the “right side” of everything and “they’re” not, fear that we the apocalypse Is Written by powers above and so we can’t change it.

I’m so happy I know a story with an Our Side now.

I’m so happy I know a story in which the true test of devotion to God’s Ineffable Plan is turning away from the dictates of Heaven and turning toward the World.

I’m so glad I met Aziraphale -- so like me, still seeking Heaven’s approval far too late in the game. I’m so grateful he found the courage to walk away, and I’m so glad I did too. I love that I know Crowley now, self-pwning lovelorn disaster demon of minor inconveniences and imagination and free will. I’m so happy Crowley was there to tempt his friend with questions from the start, and to receive him when he was finally ready to break away.

I’m so proud to know Adam and the Them and Anathema and Newt, inept humans trying their hardest against unstoppable cosmic forces, getting it right not just despite their flaws but through and because of them.

I’m so grateful I’ve finally managed to completely swap to female pronouns for God (thanks, Frances). I still love stories about Her, I still enjoy talking theology and religion. And after 20+ years of insisting God is above gender but masculinizing him, it’s about time I switch to thinking of God as Her for a spell to even things out.***

I’m so thankful for the nicest fandom I’ve known in ages and all the glorious queer beautiful amazing body-positive art and writing growing in this fabulous garden.

Confession accomplished.

P.S. I might not have the time/resources you need to chat with you if you’ve had similar experiences or want to discuss. If you need help be sure to reach somewhere healthy to get it. If you witness abuse, online or in church or otherwise -- report it, block it, mute it, shut it down, whatever is in your power.

P.P.S. If you have words of rebuke for me from a churchy place, and/or critiques about gender or politics, sorry, don’t give a f*ck. This is my story to tell and I am secure in my spiritual status. I am free indeed.

++++++++++++++

*Re. Deconversion: Or rather, I had my faith zapped out of me in what turned out to be the truest rapturous religious experience of my life. It happened in a church service; I almost fell out and spoke in tongues with the tingling power of understanding that I was truly and finally faithless. It’s an interesting deconversion story if you're familiar with charismatic church stuff, ask me sometime over tea. It felt like this.

**Re. Exorcisms: Most disturbing was the regular practice of exorcising people who clearly needed professional help for their mental health. I was present when prayers against demons happened over cases of depression, manic depression, epilepsy and other seizures, addiction, schizophrenia, and psychotic episodes. My particular church did acknowledge the role of modern medicine, but felt that the true core of these issues was spiritual and that medication ultimately could not solve a problem of demonic infestation. Looking back now I shudder and weep to think that this happened, that I was part of it once, and that it still happens daily at churches everywhere. It can be unspeakably damaging to the people being prayed over. If this practice happens in your church, leave. If it happens at a church where you’re in leadership, end it.

***Re. God as She/Her: I encourage you to find your own appropriate pronouns for God, whether you believe in Them or not. For me personally, still reeling from the Proverbs 31 upbringing, She/Her is very healing for now. But gender is a construct etc. etc.

#good omens #good omens analysis #aziraphale #crowley #exvangelical #ex-christian #neil gaiman

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megaderping · 4 years

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Dealing with some anxiety over the past few weeks about some stuff I dealt with growing up that didn’t fully sink in until just now. It is very personal. It is also very heavy. If you decide to read, please keep in mind that this deals with some pretty heavy baggage, including... Trigger Warnings: CSA, Incest, Abuse, Bullying, Ableism, Trauma, Aphobia, Homophobia Because this is a personal rant, I’d rather avoid reblogs. Thank you for understanding.

So. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time with one of my cousins. She was a good 6 - 8 years older than me. At the time, I looked up to her. I thought she was cool and smart. I trusted her. Because I was so young, I didn’t think it weird that she described french kissing to me in great detail. I never told an adult. I was too young to know that this was not okay. This wasn’t even the last time, though. When I was in first grade, she was so eager to show and describe matters related to being a teenage girl and the changes therein. I won’t go into great detail- but the way she demonstrated this... It was definitely hands on. What bothers me is that at the time, it didn’t hit me that THIS wasn’t okay either. I didn’t tell an adult because I didn’t know I was supposed to. That this was sexual abuse. She did some things with me that- it only happened once, but it REALLY, fundamentally bothers me that my longterm reaction to this was... desensitization. Maybe that’s a form of trauma in itself? I dunno. But I was able to move on eventually when she wasn’t in my life anymore. Sometimes I tell myself I shouldn’t hold it against her because she was a teenager at the time with her own issues, but... I dunno. I didn’t talk about this with anyone. I didn’t really think about it, save for once in a blue moon when I was in high school and I was like, “...maybe that was messed up.” But if you asked me at the time, I would’ve said I was okay. But I’m honestly not sure if I was. I was bullied throughout my entire public schooling. People would punch me. They’d call me names. They’d make fun of me for liking cartoons and video games and come up to me with the most ableistic voices demanding I “draw them pokaymanz”. I was the one who had to go to the school councilor for being a problem. They didn’t get in trouble. In high school, I would go out into the pod to try and study and work on assignments because the very same people who had bullied me in grade school would not SHUT UP when we were supposed to be doing assigned reading. They were not punished. Nobody stepped in when I raised concerns- the best I got was permission to distance myself. I remember sitting on the bus one day in high school, minding my own business when these girls in the seat in front of me started making fun of my name. They started making fun of my appearance. The bus driver never stepped in. I got off the bus in tears. And this was hardly the first time. This was a problem from grade school ‘til graduation. 12 - 13 years of this. Sometimes when I’m at work, trying to do my JOB, my mind will go back to something a classmate said, something a classmate DID, and I’ll lose my focus. It’ll bring me to tears even though I SHOULD be over it by now. And this has always happened to me. People talking behind my back. Spreading rumors. Going to OTHERS to deal with their problems with me instead of talking to me because apparently human decency is too much to ask. People would spread rumors that I “pooped on the playground”. They’d say I liked to sneak into the boys’ bathroom. When I was in first grade, someone shoved a leaf up my nose. I still remember that, too. I remember being told by people I considered friends that we couldn’t be friends anymore because they had new friends who didn’t like me. I remember people being cruel. A lack of understanding. It turned me into a wallflower over time because I was scared to make connections and for a time I dealt with it by being cold and abrasive because I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I remember being asked on a school trip, “Were you ever diagnosed with anything?” OUT OF NOWHERE. To this day, I wonder about that... And I don’t know if I should seek diagnosis. I probably should? I definitely need a therapist, that way I can talk this stuff out with a professional instead of rambling on a blog post just to try and calm down from a random anxiety attack. I remember classmates and chaperones resenting the fact that I got left behind on that trip because I didn’t want to jaywalk. So I had to get help from some local cops who set me up with a cab back to the hotel because I was lost and nobody thought to look if I was left behind. People would talk down to me all the time, too. Treat me like a child. And why? Because I liked cartoons? Because I’m asexual and aromantic? GOD. I remember classmates in middle school were SO OFFENDED by my asexuality, too. I recall this one girl being like, “you better get a boyfriend or people might think you’re a ~lesbian~”. ...okay, first of all. What if I was? I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not- I don’t really feel that kinda attraction to anyone. But. There is NOTHING wrong with being gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, NB, etc, etc. THESE PEOPLE EXIST. People who are not straight and/or cis exist. And also, thirteen year olds acting like they NEED to rush into relationships... That’s. Extremely concerning to me. It always was. But I guess I was just... desensitized over time because of how sexualized the climate was during those days. And it wasn’t just at school.

I have a long history of RPing. When I was in middle school, I was basically pressured into RPing a nsfw situation by some castmates. I should have said no, but I was scared to. And I think, ultimately, that also led to me being desensitized. Because that stuff was everywhere. These were RPs with young teenagers AND adults as players and nobody put their foot down and said, “hey, maybe DON’T RP nsfw in a space with minors”. Nobody said LOCK those posts. Tag them nsfw. It was just there. Out in the open. I was fourteen. And I’m not here to say that all NSFW content is inherently bad or that every adult should constantly be monitoring every space. Internet strangers are not babysitters. I get that. But I do think it’s a problem when communities full of young teens AND adults are too lax on the former’s access to 18+ content. Because there’s a difference between someone ignoring age restrictions and warnings and accidentally coming across content or being pressured to participate in such content. Now. Over time, people wised up. Many of these communities DID eventually lock that stuff to 18+. But a lot of open meme and sandbox communities did not. There were posts that’d devolve into smut on a regular basis that weren’t tagged or properly warned. But because I’d been exposed to this kinda stuff for so many years- it didn’t hit me that there was a lack of moderation. I was taught that it just comes with the territory because “this is the internet.” So for a long time, I just... accepted that. “It’s the internet.” Even within the past few years, I held onto that mindset because... it was just. What I was used to. I didn’t like it, but I assumed that was just... how things go and to express otherwise was pointless. I still don’t condone online harassment and I do think people will take properly tagged fandom content way too far (even if I disagree WITH said content)- but this isn’t ABOUT that. Because properly tagged content establishes the boundaries that were so wholly lacking in these spaces. And the fact is, I don’t LIKE that I am/was desensitized. Because the truth is, I didn’t LIKE any of it. I didn’t like the scenario I was coerced into as a young teen through RP. I didn’t like how easy it was to just... stumble upon NSFW content on accident. It’s just... I dunno. I just don’t know, and I hate that I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t let it get to me. It’s just online stuff that happened ten to twelve years ago, right? It’s nowhere near as serious as the actual sexual abuse and the actual bullying... but I think it still affected me. And just like with my cousin before, I didn’t really... talk to anyone about it? It was a very different fandom climate. The early to late 2000′s were very different. And I think just... it bothers me. That it took this long for me to realize that maybe this stuff affected me after all. Like. I’m a CSA survivor and it only JUST now clicked that I am? What’s up with that? Like. I don’t know. I need a therapist. I think I’ve needed one for years given how often I fall victim to invasive thoughts, how often I get too scared to speak my mind, how eager I am to please EVERYONE and thus it is SO hard for me to confront people when I am upset or draw the line. I’m constantly worrying about hurting or upsetting people so sometimes I guess I’m cowardly. Because I guess it’s a coping mechanism I’ve developed? Just... avoiding. Turning a blind eye. That’s probably not okay either. But I think the root of it all really is just from my childhood. How going to adults when I was bullied or abused never seemed to DO anything. So maybe I just developed a worst case scenario mindset. I just don’t know, so that’s why I need some help. So I can just... work this all out. I guess a part of me is just a little scared. And that’s stupid. Why should I be scared of something that can only HELP me? Ranting on tumblr can only do so much. But for now, just getting it off my chest is the best I can do. It’s a start, anyway.

#dorkvents #personal #tw: trauma #tw: csa #tw: homophobia #tw: aphobia #tw: incest #tw: ableism #tw: abuse #tw: bullying #basically i have a lot of baggage #and it only just hit me how much baggage i actually have #if you want me to add TW tags PLEASE let me know #i will absolutely accommodate #i just want to be able to move on but it's really hard to let go

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foxgloveburning-inactive · 4 years

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How can you be a lesbian if you're aroace?

1. you have no right to ask for explanations of others’ identities. you don’t have access to them, ESPECIALLY when it’s a literal stranger on the internet. i hope you learn to respect people’s boundaries in the future

2. that being said: i’m going to assume this anon was in good faith, i’m feeling nice, and education about LGBTQ+ topics that i’m able to speak on is something i enjoy doing! so while i have no obligation to divulge this information, for the sake of my fellow multispec aroace folk, let’s just J U M P I N T O I T

i think the main reason people are confused by aroace folks who identify this way is because they’re confusing aroaceness for not wanting any kind of intimate relationships that aren’t platonic, when in fact, that’s not the case

let me introduce you to ALTEROUS ATTRACTION!

alterous attraction is something that’s not easy to understand if you don’t experience it yourself, but the best way of describing it (which is a little too simplified and not really encompassing of the true feeling) is a type of reaction in between romantic and platonic. it’s not quite either; it’s its very own thing.

it can happen in non-aro folks, but most of the people who use it and experience it (in my own experience) are aromantic or somewhere on the aromantic spectrum.

for me, i am alterously (is that a word?) attracted to women and other women-aligned folk. some people choose to have an entirely new word for this type of orientation (although i’m not sure what it is), but i find a lot of comfort in using the term lesbian for personal reasons, so i just say that i’m a lesbian!

IMPORTANT NOTE: this is my explanation of why i personally identify as a lesbian as well as aroace. this is far from the ONLY explanation or valid reason to identify this way.

we come back to how i started out this post: it’s not your place to know or validate people’s identities. just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not a valid way to identify, and it’s not your job in the first place to determine whether our identities are “correct” or not.

if you really are curious and you want to know (ror maybe even you’re questioning if this is something you identify with), google is your friend! do the work yourself before you push it on to a stranger on the internet who, unlike me, probably has no interest, time, or energy to explain themselves to you.

tldr: i experience alterous attraction almost solely towards women and women aligned people, which is why i identify as a lesbian AND aroace

however, you shouldn’t be asking strangers on the internet to do the work of explaining themselves to you, nor should you have to understand an identity to accept it.

#important #respect people's boundaries and privacy #i'm very open about my identity #but others are usually not #ok to reblog #and please do #these are very important things #that need to be talked abt

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weaselle · 5 years

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Trans? NB? Fluid? Just... Odd?

I’m. I’m a mess. I’m not in a lot of distress about it, but I am just all kinds of twisted up. Like, If I could know then what I know now, I’d probably have changed my pronouns at 12 and started hormones as early as I could get it to happen.

But I couldn’t bring myself to like boys. I tried to, in my fantasies of being a girl. I’ve even had sex with a couple dudes to really check it out. It’s not really my thing. Like, I think a couple of men are pretty, and I could probably be in a holding hands kiss your cheek kind of romance with just the right dude, but the sex itself is pretty bleh. Meanwhile, y’know, women are just, wow. Wow.

And when I was 12 and 14 and 17 and 25 I thought, “I can’t really be a girl in a boy’s body if I don’t want to do the sex with boys”. I understood the concept of transgender (though I didn’t know the term) and I understood lesbianism as a natural normal thing. But I couldn’t unravel my own internalized trans-misogyny and I didn’t have access to the internet, and I just didn’t think I could be both those things. In my early 20′s, I didn’t think surgery would ever be in my grasp, I’d never heard of hormone treatments (I knew they were involved and why, but somehow I conceived of it as part of the surgery itself. As if it was one big day of medical remodeling, get knocked out as a man, wake up as a woman with stitches, lol, I knew nothing). Anyhow, I didn’t think I could do it, and I was worried it would be a mistake because I still didn’t like boys. I didn’t have in-home/daily access to the internet until I was almost 30. I feel like I would have been a very different person if I had grown up online. Or in a big city.

Any way, now I’m 40 and I’ve spent my whole life becoming a man I can feel comfortable being. 25 or 30 years of defining my own masculinity and learning to appreciate my body for what it is. I knew I had to try my best to be happy, and that my only resource for that was what I contained within me. So I really leaned into making do with what I had.

Now, I like what kind of man I am. But I still want to experience life as a woman.

Not, like, I don’t want to put on an outfit, I’d probably wear a lot of the same clothes I do now; I want to feel what it’s like to be a woman in a woman’s body.

But I’ve also learned to love the body I’m in, the man I am; I invested decades of effort into achieving that. Where does that leave me?

only 3 people in my real life know this about me, they all found out last year, and they are not people I see often. I move through life like a cis man, and therefore feel that women’s spaces and transwomen’s spaces are spaces I shouldn’t really be.

And I don’t want to give up the privilege, honestly. as it stands, everybody thinks I’m a straight, white, cis man (pretty sure I’m not actually 100% any of those things). It’s like the perfect storm of privilege. And it’s not like my life is super lax anyway. I don’t want to give it up what I’ve already got. Like, making less than living wage working 60 hours a week as a manager of a slowly failing restaurant while I live in my van is challenging enough, thank you, I don’t need additional risk to my personal safety or to make my job any more difficult than it already is, for real. I don’t need to start the pronoun conversation with everybody in my life. I’m already so exhausted, jesus. So I don’t know. If I can get my website of creative content to earn an income, I’ll just travel up and down the West Coast in the Duchess and be whoever the fuck I want to be. Some kind chaotic-gendered art activist witch writer or something. Until then, idk y’all, idk

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arojenniferwalters · 5 years

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No canon straight characters; using labels needed for canonicity? and period accuracy in fanfic

These are some random thoughts I have on couple of posts I've seen on my dash lately, so I'm just randomly writing down my thoughts:

1) most characters are not actually straight on canon because they don't specifically say 'I'm straight' or 'i'm only romantically and sexually attracted to people of the so called opposite gender'.

This is very true. In fact, most character never identify as straight unless there are non-straight or trans characters in the work as a counterpoint. Grace Adler says she's straight. Jennifer Walters is not lesbian. Peter whatever from Doubt is still straight when dating a trans woman. Kenzi from Lost Girl reciprocates Bo's coming out.

I recently wrote a long meta on another sideblog about how a character never identifies as straight and how the writing and portrayal lead to credible non-straight interpretations even though I know he's supposed to be straight.

So basically, straight characters are usually explicitly straight when it's known that not everyone is. If there exists character who are trans or not straight, other characters then might also express their straightness in response.

But mostly it's cisheteronormativity that makes us accept that unless they state otherwise, they are supposed to be cis and straight.

(Of course this gets complicated when we talk about rep bcus 'they didn't say they aren't x or y' doesn't really count as proper rep. But it's complicated, but like headcanons are fair game. Like, 'you shouldn't hc this canon straight character as not straight' isn't a good argument, because few character actually *are* canon straight. Most characters just have the potential to be or are in m/f pairings but that doesn't mean that straight is the only thing they can be.)

2) Labels are great. Labels tell people without a doubt who that character is and it is incredibly validating to see characters identify the same way you do (shoutout to Aled Last!). But does a character need to use a label to properly count as having this identity, if there is strong coding and word of god?

I'm conflicted. I really am. Because you can do a decent job of making characters gay/lesbian/m-spec without necessarily using a label (although not using it can be obnoxious, especially with m-spec characters), that's not necessarily the same with a-spec characters. Because there's not enough rep for us for people to read in and accept the subtext/coding. (Canon ace, coded aro is another issue but that's semi besides the point)

Here I'm mainly thinking of Raphael Santiago in books vs TV show, and comparing 2 word of god demi characters; Rivka of Mangoverse and Julian Blackthorn of The Dark Artifices.

So, book!Raphael for a long time was barely/maybe coded aroace and after he was killed off he became a word of god aroace through twitter. Then came 2017 and the tv show and new book appearances and suddenly he got to verbally say ace (and/or aro) things without using the label. I haven't read-read the books with that canonization yet but it seems to be very clear now that he is sex and romance repulsed aroace. Great.

The tv show canonized his aceness before the books did but they did it without using labels and basically making a mess of his romantic orientation (is he still aro? Arospec? Alloromantic who just didn't feel rom attraction much? He never did pursue a romantic relationship with Izzy after the addiction mess even though they acknowledged that they cared for each other, but was it romantic from Raph? We don't know! *throws hands in the air in frustration*).

As much as I love show!Raphael, "I'm just not interested in sex." isn't necessarily the best way to establish aceness. Mostly because if you google 'not interested in sex', you get articles on libido and how to increase it, with one article talking about aceness, but not in the title. But the fact that Raphael says he's always been like this, that he's never pressured into having sex and is at peace with his orientation does, to me, make it good rep. I still kinda wish he'd used a label though.

Then the demi rep: neither Rivka nor Julian identifies as demi in text. Shira Glassman didn't at first realize she was writing Rivka in a demi way, in fact the backcover identifies her as straight (kinda as a 'there will be no romantic tension between Rivka and Shulamit' way, similar to Bo and Kenzi in section 1). But when people mentioned that she seems like a hetro demi, Shira embraced that and while the world doesn't do labels the way we do, she is still demi. I love her and I am happy she exists and she is accepted demi rep.

Now, Julian is a different thing. In TDA, he is 17, the year is 2012 and the Internet exists. After the 2nd book, people started speculating that Julian is demi based on how he thinks about never being attracted to anyone but Emma, and how he had started to feel different from his peers when he didn't start experiencing attraction like they did. Someone asked about this from Cassandra Clare and she answered the ask privately, saying that if he was a modern, non-Shadowhunter teenager and he had access to information about the identity, that he would identify as demisexual. The issue is that considering the timeframe (2012) and everything about his situation, he doesn't have access to that label so he doesn't use it.

So. Here we have a canon demi character, based on coding and word of god who has semi realistic reason for not knowing the label and thus not identifying with it, even though he would if he could. But a lot of people don't want to accept that. And that's where my issues come from: Julian says and thinks some very demi things, and to me doesn't do anything that invalidates his deminess. Why is that not enough? Like, I absolutely want him to use that label, I want to read him say it and find comfort in it. But why is his character not demi rep enough because he doesn't use the word?

Rivka has similar reasons for not having the label (not our world and the terminology doesn't exist) and while I doubt there are that much overlap between the 2 fandoms, I am curious about the difference. Neither one is not identifying as demi because they aren't demi, they don't identify as demi because they don't know the identity exists. Yet both are still demi characters.

How much does a character have to emphasize that they've only ever been attracted to one person/very few people, with the author validating that reading, before they are acceptable demi rep?

Another point is Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess. That one has at least one demi character and maybe two acearo characters but they don't use labels. I love them all, but I feel uncertain about talking about Cid as an aroace character because she hasn't been talked about in that way the way Jayla has been. And I love Quinn and I cried when I read that the (pirate) ship has characters who identify as demisexual in a creator letter, but again, no one is using a-spec labels. It's frustrating. But it doesn't invalidate the rep.

3) I think the level of knowledge characters have on queerness should be an in-character discussion. Like, I've written characters as demi without the character using the label; I've written characters discovering a label; I have one fic where there's little possibility of the character having knowledge of the identity (because it's possible the label hasn't been coined yet). I try to stay in character about whether the character would know or have use for label and keep in mind the timeframe. There's a demi pairing I can't really write because neither characters exist in 2006 and beyond. Someone once complained that a book published in 2003 didn't describe the character as demi when the label hadn't yet been created while asexual worked as an umbrella term which included demis, so it still makes sense that the character would identify as asexual.

I don't think it's wrong to have a character be very knowledgeable about queer things if that's what you want to write, whether or not that's in character or realistic within the timeframe. Fanfic is about self indulgeance after all.

Some of that relates to what I'm in the mood to write. My magnum opus is 'this character is demi in all 78 eps of the show, but he'll only figure it out towards the beginning of the last season, just because I want that' and then I have another that's 'screw it, he has a better idea about his queerness but realizes the full picture in s4'.

I do try to be period accurate and think about whether or not the character would have access to the term. But sometimes I just want to have my faves identifying the way I want them to.

4) These are some very random, semi connected thoughts and I'm not even quite sure what the point was. I just feel like writing more about these things.

I am interested in discussing these issues. How much coding does a character need to be accepted as proper rep if the label isn't used? Can rep be valid if a random person reading it doesn't realize that there is that specific coding? If the book has queer readers, is there more leeway (sp) to not using the label, assuming that people reading a book with bi and trans characters or an f/f might also pick up the demi/ace/aro coding? If the author unknowingly wrote a demi character, does it still count if they accept that reading of the character and keep writing them as demi?

Anyway that was a lot of randomness.

#idk how to tag this #my ramblessay

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lifestreamsblog · 5 years

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Why Gaming is Slowly Becoming a Chore

(In this article, I’m not going to link to examples and / or articles, so you will have to use your own imagination and / or knowledge.)

It’s really hard for me to enjoy gaming these days.

And no, it’s not because of the AAA Games Industry causing their own bubble burst. And it’s not because I don’t have access to my favourite consoles. And it’s not because I don’t have games that I love (and no, it’s not even because I have too many games that I love).

It’s because of two factors:

I prefer to play games with (or for) other people in my life

The games fandom and industry is full of nostalgia, toxicity, misogyny, mindless hatred, misdirected anger, unforgivable hypocrisy and rampant misinformation

This sort of garbage is enough to make any gamer girl completely uncomfortable...

I Prefer to Play Games with (or for) Other People in My Life:

This is perhaps one of the most difficult things about gaming for me, as what I play generally is tied to what other people in my life play. For me, gaming is a purely social experience, whether that’s playing multiplayer games...

...or playing single-player games with other people around watching.

This is difficult when you’re truly in love with one particular console, while other people in your life drift to another console. Forgetting the issue of console loyalty for a moment, it has to be considered that gaming is an expensive hobby. And when interests in your social circle shift, it can be difficult to keep up, especially if you truly enjoy one console versus another.

I’m a huge fan of the Nintendo Switch. And for a long time, so was everybody else in my life, including my fiancée, who was perhaps the single-most-important person in my life, as well as the person I played games with the most.

Recently, my fiancée has become much more interested in the XBOX ONE, which has made things difficult for me, as I was only able to get one after our household’s federal tax return came in. This meant that for months, I wasn’t able to play games with her nearly as often as I would have liked, which really made me depressed, even though I tried--likely unsuccessfully--to hide it.

Of course, I have my own XBOX ONE now, so I should feel happier now that we’re able to play more games together, right?

Well, the truth is that there was something truly magical about our experiences together on the Switch and while the XBOX ONE has offered both of us some amazing experiences thus far, it hasn’t matched the magic I felt when we played games together on the Switch.

Another thing that doesn’t help is that the Switch almost seems like an afterthought in conversations not just with my fiancée, but with everybody else in my household. Instead of discussing the games getting Switch versions, we’re discussing the PC and XBOX ONE versions instead. It doesn’t help that games like Octopath Traveller are no longer Switch exclusives, which leads me to feel even more alienated, as everyone seems so excited that a game that made Switch very special is--all of a sudden--going to a “more powerful platform.”

This is a lot more hurtful to me than I likely let on...and really, the only time I’ve ever discussed feeling this way is right now, here in this article. The fact that I’m not able to articulate my feelings as well as I would like makes things even worse. In the end, I love my new XBOX ONE, but I really wish that the Switch didn’t get all but the boot simply because we got Microsoft’s latest and greatest system...

The Games Fandom and Industry is Full of Nostalgia, Toxicity, Misogyny, Mindless Hatred, Misdirected Anger, Unforgivable Hypocrisy and Rampant Misinformation:

I don’t suppose this one needs much explanation, but I absolutely want to discuss how it’s making gaming more difficult to enjoy for me in particular.

I can’t begin to number just how many “reboots” and “remasters” of old games and franchises are being released these days. It’s not just in gaming, but in all of mass media. It would seem that people who grew up in the 80s and 90s would like to have those eras come back in full force, forgetting just what it means to have actual “progress.” It’s like these people have never heard of “trying something new” before.

It’s fucking stupid and completely uncreative.

And this mindset also leads to the next set of issues: toxicity and misogyny. Men who think women are objects to fulfill their own needs...and people who think all Muslims are terrorists, all LGBTQ people are sick and all black people are criminals are rampant within the gaming fandom. And these people act so entitled that they come across as if they are in the right for demanding women jump on their dicks while claiming that all people not like them are evil and criminal. It creates such a horrendous atmosphere that I dare not ever join in any kind of live chat.

And this whole situation surrounding the misogyny, specifically, creates an aura that drives many women in gaming to extreme sex-negativity. One of the many reasons SONY recently decided to block sexual content from all future games is in the name of not wanting to offend their women gamers. Not only was this a disingenuous move, it shows just how this situation stifles sex-positive feminists such as myself, who have found empowerment in franchises like Senran Kagura and Hyperdimension Neptunia, both of which have sex-positive content and both of which have huge lesbian fandoms that far outnumber the male fandoms.

And both of which will now suffer content blocking from SONY because of sex-negativity rooted from misogyny-based trauma.

Way to remove representation and relatability for people like me, folks!

It makes me want to puke.

Then there are the fandoms. The fandoms are full of people whose brains are so stuck in how long they’ve been following a particular company or franchise that they don’t often understand what’s happening right in front of their faces.

Like when Nintendo fans claim that there is no third-party support for the Switch. Or that Nintendo may--one day--become like EA or Activision. And how about the Nintendo fans who think the Wii U is a huge, steaming sack of shit simply because it didn’t sell an obscene number of units? And then there are the Nintendo fans who don’t shut up about Pikmin 4, Metroid Prime 4, Animal Crossing: Where’s Our New Game? and more. And the Nintendo fans who think Let’s Go! isn’t a real Pokémon game and that a lack of Nintendo Directs in any given month means Nintendo is ignoring their entitled asses and I could go on and on and on.

And then there are the general fans. The general fans who complain that games aren’t hard enough and that everyone who wants easier game modes are complete and utter idiots who don’t deserve to play videogames. And then there are the fans who think that if you don’t have the right graphics card or right PC rig that you’re a total imbecile who shouldn’t be in the same room with gamers. And gatekeeping gatekeeping hatred hatred shittalk shittalk blahblahblah.........

And some of these fans complain about all of the above and more! Yes, even Nintendo fans fall into the general fans category sometimes.

These people are a pure delight, aren’t they?

The games community is so unwelcoming, hostile, bitter and full of shit that it makes me feel really alienated when I’m already struggling to enjoy myself amongst other people in my life. And it leaves me feeling as if I have no voice whatsoever.

It just makes me want to break down into sobs...

Sometimes, I wonder if things will ever improve. Sometimes, I sit with my thoughts and let them brew inside of me for days, weeks and months on end. People in my life can often tell I’m unhappy, but I don’t always speak up enough about how I feel.

In Grade 8, I had an English teacher who helped me with my writing, which--at the time--was atrocious. I couldn’t even string together a proper sentence. And my last paper I wrote for him wasn’t much better than the first. When he gave me his remarks, I burst into tears. He just handed me a box of tissues and waited for me to calm down a bit before saying this:

“Never stop writing. Promise me that. Because one day, you will improve. And when you do, you will be able to tell the world how you feel.”

I never forgot that. And because of him, I developed my now-strong writing skills.

Even though I have had trouble speaking up about how I feel regarding these issues previously, In the end, the most I can do is try my best to speak up now, which is why I wrote this blog post in the first place. While some of you may stumble upon this from the broader internet, this piece isn’t for you, but rather for those in my life.

This is me trying to open up a bit more.

And I know this article isn’t my best work and that it’s full of rambling and subject-switches, but I’m very depressed and this whole piece reflects that mood, so I’m going to leave it--for the most part--in the imperfect state it’s currently in.

#gaming #depression #struggle #fandom #community

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whiteanti · 5 years

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this is honestly such a big issue within our communities, the "reclamation" of slurs. and i hate it so much esp when white passing ppl do it like hello? i dont like it when they call themselves people of color either bc they dont fucking know the struggle of being racialized, they only know how to whine abt not being white enough for the whites n poc for the poc. i wish we had another term to call ourselves bc white passing weirdos and spicy whites took the term poc and fucking ran with it

(1) lmao theres this person whos url is [redacted] whos south n se asian but is like ¼ chinese and and made ch*nk jokes then ppl confronted them on anon n they said its just whites trying to police their “pocness”… and what bugs me about ppl like this is how they dont reclaim slurs they just use them to be edgy online. it doesnt matter how much % dna u have of an ethnicity if ur not racialized as it dont fucking use slurs u know u’ll never be called they have literal worms for brains

ok sorry for reformatting like this I’m just already anxious as hell bc of exams rn so I rlly can’t deal w getting into fights w ppl like that but anyways ik who ur talking abt and its the same person as I was but I don’t have any receipts and I haven’t interacted for the past couple of years so I’m not gonna assume u know. also idk if these r the same anon but these r kinda similar so I’m gonna out them together. my reply got rlly fucking long so its under the cut 😛

anyways I feel like a lot of ppl esp on tumblr ‘reclaim’ slurs for the edginess of it bc they’re teenagers in a white society trying to figure out how to b a poc in a way that isn’t acceptable to white ppl and/or they think its CoolTM bc all their mutuals r doing it. like to a certain extent I get it bc when I was 13/14 I was like that as well. I called myself a chink bitch and all that shit but also I was a fucking dumbass kid who was doing both of the above. but ppl who r 17/18/19/20+ who carry on doing these crazy fucking jokes and tell kids who r impressionable and young that this is a good and healthy way to reclaim their identity? wack. the way ppl treat each other and the way ppl have normalised treating themselves w absolutely no respect in the name of activism or whatever is….. just crazy. calling urself slurs to degrade urself isn’t funny reclaiming shit ur just making urself feel worse. theres literally nothing positive abt it ur making no impact, ur doing positive for ‘the cause’ or urself either. so thats my thoughts on most of the ‘slur reclamation’ that happens on tumblr.

onto what ur actually saying sdkjfhs I basically agree 100%. ppl who r white passing shouldn’t b able to reclaim slurs bc they’re never gonna have the slurs used against them if they’re white passing? bc like being able to reclaim a slur basically has 2 parts a) was the slur targeted at u (e.g. a butch lesbian can’t reclaim f*g even if its used against them bc it’s meant for gay men and they’re just being mistaken to b a gay man) and b) are u ever actually gonna get targeted by the slur (e.g. a white passing person is never gonna get called a racial slur in the street bc they look white). if u fit both them congrats u can reclaim the slur! but generally I find it rlly iffy if ppl just start throwing around slurs or calling other ppl that slur esp if its not widely reclaimed in the community (big example: YELLOW)

but also if ur white passing and u decide that ur gonna reclaim a slur ok thats fine bc technically ur a poc but u literally can’t get angry at poc who freak out when u say it bc??? u look white??? what do u want us to do look up ur fucking family tree before u start throwing slurs around??? like anyways I’ve always had a whole mess of issues w white passing ppl and tbh mixed white poc to a certain extent esp when y'all act like the shit u get from poc is just as bad as racism…. like getting ‘rejected’ by a poc culture aint as bad as literal racism but anyways. white passing poc r like….. what u want me to do……. feel sorry for u?? apologise??

like white passing ppl have a unique place in society to b able to stand up against racism in white spaces bc y'all do know what its like to b a poc to a certain extent and obviously have access to white spaces as well. white ppl trust u as an ‘ambassador’ for poc bc u look white but every time I interact w u guys either irl or online u side w white ppl/racism bc its so nice to benefit from appearing white but not so nice to have to stand up for poc. like this is so many ppl ESPECIALLY white passing e asians u guys r transparent as hell. obviously not every white passing person is like this but from all the white passing ppl I’ve interacted w like shits the same bruh.

ok like 50th anyways but ANYWAYS like I identify myself a lot as a poc online bc theres a lot more solidarity politics(? idk if thats the right term but lmao) on here than irl. the internet is a good way to connect w different ppl that u wouldn’t otherwise meet irl so thats why. its a hard issue bc a lot of the time ‘poc’ merges ALL of our experiences together whether ur rich, poor, white passing, an immigrant, black, asian, etc, etc, etc and we all obviously have different experiences of racism and how we interact w our race/ethnicity and as I’ve said before whilst ‘poc’ is a kinda useful term sometimes for solidarity and talking abt racism generally but its overused a lot. theres no harm in being specific abt the kind of racism u face if its specific to a certain race or ethnicity or group or whatever.

also tbh a term for non-white passing poc would b useful that doesn’t surround the idea of white passing ppl being the norm. (something like visible poc? idk) but anyways this has gotten so long I’m just ranting/rambling at this point so I’m sorry for answering ur asks so weirdly?

#like this got so long skdjfhskdjf #I didn't rlly collect my thoughts properly cba but yea I'm sorry skdjfhdsjk #asks #anon #anti white mood

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literallyjustablog · 5 years

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ALL of this is going under a readmore because I started typing for almost an hour about lowkey heavy stuff and personal stuff and I hate bothering people <3 have a good day, I believe in you all.

PRE reading: there’s some like. implied stuff here that ain’t happy and I advise caution if you need it? (lotta personal stuff ending in why I define my PMA the way I do, if you’re here from the PMA tag.)

it’s been ages since I’ve used this account. it was mainly a second, completely separated blog from my main; different from an alt or a sideblog, a place where i could break down in totality when I wasn’t okay and desperately needed to get everything out in a place where I didn’t need to try to keep everything happy, because the internet (and life in general) has been so dark and sad and bleak these past few years, I don’t need to contribute to it.

But I started healing, and slowly, slowly, I didn’t need to use this account as a place to scream into a void and hope somebody heard (or didn’t.) I learned how to tell my friends when I wasn’t doing okay, and I taught some of them sign language since I have a processing disorder, and I confided in a few of them about some of the nastiest shit in my personal history.

But a couple weeks ago, in my sociology class, we read Speak. And all of it came crumbling down. walls, the safety, my ability to rely on my friends and trust they wouldn’t judge me. gone.

Not total destruction. Not back to square one. But a nice, relatively well built cottage (that sometimes had a leak in the roof) got torn down, brick by brick and page by page of that book, into a halfhearted ruin of what it was. Unlivable. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I was fine. Thought my ex couldn’t hurt me anymore, that it was over and done and I’d separated and I’d healed, damn you, leave me alone you manipulative BASTARD-

Turns out, scars still kind of hurt? sometimes. It was easier to rebuild the second time- Melinda getting a happier ending than I could’ve hoped for probably helped. But despite telling my friends about what happened in that relationship with that ex, I never told them how it felt. And it ate away at me. Constantly, with every word in that book. (A good book, though. I wouldn’t read it again in the near future, but it was a good book.) What I felt was only ever contained in google docs and notepads and sketchbooks and all variety of media to be written down and destroyed.

But I had a thought. I wonder if the reason I felt so violently sick every time he tried to kiss me, or go for the breasts or whatever the fuck else, I wonder if the reason i felt like acid was burning my insides was because I’m gay. If the reason every time I think about what happened in that relationship, I feel gross, like I need to just remove every part of my body that identifies me as a Human Female and launch myself into the sun, shed my soul’s body so my soul can go take a shower and feel clean. I wonder if it’s because I’m a lesbian. It was middle school- I have conservative, “love the person hate the sin” parents, where gayness is a disease and “it’s God’s place to judge.” I didn’t even know what a “gay” was. I only ever knew “gay” in the context of “gay yellow curtains,” from something I read in a book published in fucking 1980. the word gay wasn’t spoken in my house. I had no way of knowing. It’s why I thought I was ace at first- it was all I could connect with. Not wanting anything to do with sex, that sounded right. (Because all I googled was “I feel sick when my boyfriend kisses me.”) (Also, this isn’t an anti-ace thing, ace people are valid as fuck and if you disagree I will break your kneecaps and use the bonemeal to buff up my strawberry plants.)

But I wonder if that whole “sickness” feeling was because I was trying to force myself to be straight and be what I wasn’t. I wasn’t straight. I’m a damn circus knot, “oh, yeah, you thought it was untied? SIKE!”

In the three years post-breakup, I label jumped. I googled in Incognito- I only ever access this blog from incognito. I learned about the LGBTQ+ community. found a home. found friends who were like me, learned to accept myself. Bounced around from ace, to bi, to “maybe I’m lesbian? but I could probably date a guy romantically?” and a friend went “oh so you’re biromantic then! :)” and they were really helpful, and I came to the realization during spring break that no, I wasn’t biromantic (though again: bi and pan people are valid as hell and I will fill your sinuses with liquid mercury) I was just still reeling from the effects of breaking myself out of the fucking prison cell I built for myself of “gays are evil” “gay is a sin” “you shouldn’t be like this, it’s not normal” basically I had a lot of internalized everything and It took me five years after learning what a “gay” was to heal from that first bit of “gays aren’t evil, it’s not a sin, it is normal.” and then I started on undoing that emotionally manipulative bastard who warped and twisted my brain.

my point is, I don’t actually have one. A point to this. A reason for writing this out for almost an hour, now.

Heteronormativity hurts people like me, who don’t know about anything other than hetero.

Heteronormativity can get people like me into messed up situations.

I don’t have a point. I don’t know why I wrote this all out. I don’t know why I spent an hour typing and typing and typing.

What I do know, is that I’m alright. I’m not okay, and I’m not perfect, but I’m alright. I’m functional. I’m healing. I’ll be okay. I’ll take me a big old handful of PMA and tell myself to feel what I’m feeling, finish riding it out, look back, and go “how can I fix this?” not “I’m going to die.” I’m not going to force myself to be happy all the time, I’m going to accept that it’s okay to not be okay sometimes, and it’s okay to ask people for help, and if they really care about you, they’ll be okay helping you.

I’m not perfectly healed. I’m still a little cracked at the edges, and sometimes it splinters. But I’m healing, and I’m doing better, and that’s what really matters, I think.

#long post #personal #sorry #probably gonna leave the blog up? but gonna try not to use it.#healing #i'm getting better at it.#also by long post I mean this thing is like a damn novel.#pma #I'M SORRY IF IT BREAKS THE TAG BUT LIKE. I GOT MY VERSION OF PMA IN HERE #I'M GONNA LIVE BY IT #I started writing at 1:30 AM and I'm hitting post at 2:34 lmao

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thebibliosphere · 6 years

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I keep seeing these stories of people who got into erotica/stories containing erotica at the same age I did but who were then preyed on by adults within those circles & i wonder why my story is so different in that regard. It might be because I had unfettered access to my mom's bookshelf and when i WAS seeking online erotica my main gateway was a friend my own age who's house i was at every weekend so in both cases i was pretty safe & had no need of interacting with adults until i was one.

That likely stems from a large part of it. A lot of my very early fandom stuff also came from a slightly older friend who had internet access and would show me all the places to find things. Her bedroom up on the third floor was one of the few places where it felt safe to enthuse about certain things and wtf about others and figure out important things like “that’s probably not possible, right?”

But it was still done with an element of secrecy. If we heard her mum walking up the stairs we’d hide the things we were looking at, and pretend to be laughing at something else. In hindsight I’m partly sure her mum knew. Enough books went missing from nightstand for it not to be obvious, and I’m sure we were nowhere near as subtle as we thought we were.

By contrast in my own house, romance and sex in any form was considered utterly taboo to the point of terror. I now know Dad actually wrote smutty short stories on the side for people at work just for funsies (I knew I got it from somewhere!), but my mother was very adamantly Disproving of all things that could be considered sexual in content to the point of being so controlling it was abusive.

She treated my privacy like a thing I was not entitled to, rummaging through drawers and removing things she didn’t approve of. She didn’t read any of my books to see if they were appropriate or not, but she’d look at the covers and maybe skim the blurb and decide if it sounded wholesome enough from that. Usually they weren’t.

I still remember having a picture on my wall of me and my best friend hugging, like you know, 14 year old girls do, and it resulted in a massive shouting match about how people might think I was a lesbian and she ripped the photo up. At the time I was livid, and remained so for many years. But now it just makes me sad because I realize it was likely coming from a place of ignorance and terror. And that’s no way to live your life. Or to dictate the life of your child. An apology for that incident would still be appreciated, but I won’t hold my breath over it.

After that I became adept at hiding the things that mattered to me, and it’s still bad enough to the point that if I am writing something and ETD comes up behind me, I will flick the screen away because I fear what will happen for being myself.

It’s getting better now, as the years go by and I’m further removed from that puritanical setting of fear and anger. I even have some of my romance books out on display in the living room. I had a fireman comment on one once, and ask me if it was any good cause his wife liked “those kind of books” and he wanted to get her something nice. I sent him on his way with several recommendations typed up in his phone. Whether it was for him or for his wife, who knows, but it was a nice moment. That and y’know, not having my house burn down.

So did my parents rules lead me to seek out things online and throw me into the line of other adults less concerned with maintaining my innocence? I’m not going to lie, it likely hastened it along because I was a little shit and did lots of things just to be contrary. Could they have prevented it? Probably not, because as previously stated I was a little shit. But they could have made sure I was better equipped to deal with things, and keep myself safe rather than actively flinging myself into the abyss out of curious spite.

If you fear the wolves in the woods, you don’t blindfold your kid and shove them out the door. At least, you shouldn’t.

#long post #child abuse #emotional abuse #homophobia #internet safety #deadgodjess

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whoneedsapublisher · 3 years

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Misha’s Fantasy

I may have to up my posting speed, because somehow my queue is still at 48... anyway, today’s entry is a very smutty Misha x Emi fic.

Words: ~2100

Summary: Back in highschool, there was a book that Misha kept hidden behind her desk. A book with well worn pages, and all sorts of earmarks from heavy reading. She used to fantasize about someone finding it. In college, someone does.

Also on Ao3

********************

Misha had spent a lot of time fantasizing. Why wouldn’t she have? She wasn’t asexual, and she’d been a horny teenage girl who was single for all of high school. Fantasies were inevitable. Yamaku’s internet access had been too curtailed to look at porn, but in a visit to a city she’d manage to find an erotic novel that wasn’t so obviously erotic that it gave her away, and she’d flipped through it a thousand times in her dorm, imagining herself as the women that made love across its pages.

Sometimes, she’d fantasized about someone finding the book. She hid it in her dorm, but not all that well. After all, it wasn’t a porn mag. She could always deny it was anything erotic if someone found it shoved behind her desk. Claim it was a book she’d bought used and lost before she ever read, and she had no idea what was in it.

But she’d always secretly hoped someone would find it and know what it was just by the cover.

“Oh,” the girl who found it would say. “You dirty, dirty girl. Reading something like this… you’re a lesbian.”

Misha would stammer, and stutter, but not actually deny it.

“It’s alright, kitten.” The girl’s voice would be dripping with her honey, and her gaze would be intense. “I am too. I’ve masturbated over this book just as often as you have.”

“Oh yeah?” Emi asks, cocking her head with a sly grin on her face. “What would she do next?”

Misha blushes. “Well…” she says, as Emi lazily fans the pages of the book. “She’d… she’d make me take off all of my clothes.”

“Wow! She doesn’t mess around, huh?” Emi says, laughing. “Do you even know her name at this point?”

“Wahaha, that’s a funny question, Emi,” Misha says, a smile slipping on to her face despite her blush. “I wouldn’t just let a stranger poke around in my room, would I?”

“That’s true,” Emi says, meeting Misha’s gaze. “And I bet she wouldn’t even be threatening you or anything, right? She’d get you to take your clothes off just by looking you dead in the eyes and giving the order.”

Misha gulpes, her smile faltering a little as her blush grew.

“Take all your clothes off, Misha,” Emi says. “And stand with your hands behind your back.”

“Wahaha… I didn’t say anything about that last part.”

Emi grins. “Yeah, but I wanna see it. So do it.”

Misha’s heart beats so hard that she’s sure Emi must be able to hear it. It feels like it’s going to beat itself out of her chest. And yet, strangely, as she reaches down to undo the buttons on her blouse, her hands are perfectly steady.

“Hey Misha,” Emi says, as she watched Misha disrobe. “How good is the soundproofing in the dorm?”

“We’re in the same dorm,” Misha says. “Shouldn’t you know?”

“I haven’t hooked up with anyone since high school, and none of the people in my hall have brought anyone to the dorms. You said your neighbour had a boyfriend, right?”

Misha nods “Yeah. He stays over sometimes, but I don’t really hear anything.”

“Perfect,” Emi says. Her flash with a sudden heat that takes Misha aback. “I wanna hear you get loud.”

Misha flushes even more, turning her head away as she pulls off her shirt.

Immediately, she can feel Emi’s eyes on her chest. It makes her skin tingle, and she struggles a little with the button on her jeans, her fingers still not shaking but starting to get a little clumsy.

As she reaches back to unhook her bra, she risks a glance at Emi’s face. Emi meets her gaze with a smile. But it’s not the casual, happy smile she has when they’re laughing together on a date, nor is the fierce, satisfied smile that pins her face in place as she runs as fast as she ran. It’s a hungry smile, the teeth of wolf showing as it spreads its lips in anticipation.

Misha looks away again hurriedly. Not frightened, exactly. Not quite. But… not confident enough to match that desire with an invitation. Finally, she finishes stripping and tucks her hands behind her back. If she thought she could feel Emi’s gaze on her before, now it’s like she has heat vision, trails of fire roaming across her body and leaving her burning in their wake.

“Well?” Emi says leaning back on Misha’s bed casually, her eyes still locked on Misha despite her relaxed pose. “What happens next?”

“She…” Misha says, forcing herself not to mumble or look down at the floor. “She… asks me… what my favourite passages from the book are…”

Emi smirks. “Oh,” she says, that single word encapsulating a sudden depth of understanding and sly acceptance. “Well, then. Why don’t you go ahead and give me a page number?”

“Well… the first one is… page... 45,” Misha says. “Starting from the second paragraph.”

Emi flips through the book and then starts scanning the page. “Wow,” she says. “So this is what you think of when you’re touching yourself? You naughty girl.”

Misha lets out a little whimper. She can feel her nipples hardening in the open air, and a familiar warmth is gathering between her legs.

“Veronica cups Sophia’s cheek in her hand,” Emi reads. “Sophia stifles a moan and closes her eyes. Veronica is barely touching her, and already her body is on fire.”

Misha feels her face getting hot and fights the urge to squirm. She’d expected Emi to read out the passage mockingly, but instead she’s reading aloud in a sultry voice, low and smooth.

“Suddenly, she feels Veronica’s hand slip down the front of her pants. Sophia’s eyes shoot open as she suddenly feels Veronica’s long, slim fingers lightly brushing against her pubic hair.”

Misha is sure she’s wet now.

““Veronica,” Sophia whines, closing her eyes. “What is it, my kitten?” Veronica asks. “I won’t know what you want unless you tell me.””

Misha shudders at the low, hoarse tone of Emi’s impersonation of Veronica.

“So, Misha,” Emi says, looking up from the book. “Do you imagine Veronica’s fingers on you when you touch yourself? Do you imagine her whispering in your ear?”

Misha squeezes her eyes shut and nods.

“Hmm,” Emi says, and Misha hears her get up off the bed and walk over to Misha. When she speaks again, she’s behind Misha. “What’s another scene you like?”

“Page 58,” Misha says. The sound of turning pages comes from behind her.

““Sophia,” Veronica says,” Emi reads. “Veronica embraces Sophia’s naked body from behind.” Suddenly, Emi presses herself against Misha, one arm lazily wrapping around Misha’s waist. ““I want you,” she says,” Emi continues. “As her hand slips between Sophia’s legs.” Emi’s hand slides down Misha’s stomach, and Misha shivers, her hands gripping her thighs.

““Now, then, pet,” Veronica says. “As before. You must tell me, if I am to know. What do you want me to do?””

Emi pauses, her hand resting gently against Misha.

Misha’s heart beats. Seconds pass, and Emi doesn’t read the next line.

“Well?” Emi says softly. “You know the next line, don’t you?”

“”I…”” Misha manages. “”I want you to touch me,” Sophia says.”

““Oh?” Veronica says,” Emi says, leaning in even closer to whisper in Misha’s ear. ““Where do you want me to touch you, little kitten? And how do you wish me to do so?””

““My… p-pussy…” Sophia says.” Misha’s voice is quivering, much like Sophia’s must have been. “”Please, Veronica. Touch my pussy. Touch me passionately, and thoroughly, and make me come. Use your beautiful fingers to make me yours.””

““What a good girl you are-” Emi reads. “-Misha.””

Misha starts in shock.

“As her lover leans back into her,” Emi continues. “Emi slides her hand lower, between Misha’s legs.”

Almost involuntarily, Misha leans backwards, as Emi’s fingertips brush against her puffy lips.

“She finds Misha already wet, ready for her touch.”

Misha’s face burns. Something as simple as replacing the names should be almost meaningless, and yet, the removal of that last barrier makes things all the more intense somehow.

“Emi slips a finger gently between her lips, the small intrusion enough to make Misha whimper.”

Misha whimpers. She’s honestly not sure if it’s because she’s playing along with the narration, or simply because her body can’t help but react to Emi’s fingers. They’re not really like Veronica’s fingers. Emi’s fingers aren’t that long, and they’re not as delicate and precise as a pianist’s fingers. But she certainly can’t say that they aren’t living up to her fantasies right now.

““Ver-” Misha says, and then swallows and starts over. ““Emi,” S- Misha says. “Please… I need more…””

““If you wish, my love,” Emi says. Gently, slowly, and with the deliberate grace Misha has come to expect from her, she slips another finger into Misha’s quivering pussy.””

Emi is as good as her word, and Misha closes her eyes and lets out a moan. As she does she realizes that she’s still on script.

“Misha moans,” Emi continues, stroking Misha’s inner walls as Misha shudders in pleasure. “Emi’s fingers move confidently inside her, and she’s helpless to resist the pleasure. She quivers and shakes as Emi’s fingers continue relentlessly, her thumb massaging her outside as she does.”

“Ah… ah… Emi…” Misha manages.

“Misha moans Emi’s name in between her gasps and cries. As her mind fogs with pleasure, Emi’s thumb creeps closer and closer to her hood. Misha feels her orgasm building, her lover playing her just like she plays her violin, finely tuned and utterly responsively to her touch, the sounds she emits a direct and intentional consequence of the dance of Emi’s fingers.”

That passage had always been a particular favourite of Misha’s. The reality is just as sweet as she always imagined it to be. Sweeter, in fact. Emi is smaller than her, a little shorter and skinnier, and despite that, she’s pulling the strings of Misha’s body as certainly as if she was giant using her like a marionette. Something about that is undeniably a turn on.

It also helps that Emi is really good at this. Misha had thought most of Emi’s romantic experience was with guys, but it sure doesn’t feel like it now. Her fingers are just as talented and mind-melting as Veronica’s ever were.

“Struggle though she might,” Emi says, after a short period of silence. “Misha feels her orgasm fast approaching.”

She isn’t wrong. Misha’s breathing is heavy, and the pleasure is quickly becoming too much to bear.

““I can tell you’re struggling, kitten,”” Emi whispers in her ear. “Emi says. “Do not worry.I will allow you the release you so desperately desire. Come for me, my darling Misha.”

And with that, her thumb rubs Misha’s clitoris as her fingers curl, and Misha is undone.”

She says it just before she does it. Misha is sure the delay is intentional. The anticipation of it only makes the pleasure even more intense when Emi shifts just as she describes and pushes Misha over the edge, her juices gushing out over Emi’s hands as she cries out and reaches climax, her legs trembling as waves of ecstasy crash over her, ferried along by the motion of Emi’s fingers drawing it out longer and longer.

Finally, she slumps, and Emi withdraws her fingers and gently lowers Misha to a sitting position, holding her close and stroking her hair as Misha hazily comes down from her orgasm.

“Wow,” Misha manages, dazed.

Emi giggles girlishly, giving Misha a quick squeeze and kissing her on top of her head. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” Misha says, clasping Emi’s hand and leaning back into her. “Thank you, Emi.”

“Well, I enjoyed myself too,” Emi says. “And I like knowing that if you ever masturbate to that book again, you’re going to be thinking of my fingers inside you, not Veronica’s.” She hugs Misha a little more tightly, a fierce little smile on her face, not unlike the expression she has when she’s running. “I like that idea a lot.”

Misha laughs. “Wahaha! I didn’t know you were so possessive, Emi.”

“Who wouldn’t want to keep you all to herself?” Emi says playfully.

“Wahaha~! Flatterer.”

“So then,” Emi says, picking up the book again and hefting it in one hand with a smile. “Is there a part in this book where Sophia eats Veronica out? Or do we have to write some fanfiction?”

#katawa shoujo #emimisha #n*sfw text

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