I may not be a fruitcake, but I definitely am a cake. And I used to eat lots of cake on November 26th because it's my cousin's birthday. I had some cake on Monday evening and it did not sit right with my insulin resistance, so I cannot possibly have it again today. And that's a shame.
Scherzi a parte, this long story is my Ace Day contribution.
These were the requirements:
In addition to your ace card, include a personal message, story, artwork, or whatever you want to express in reference to your orientation(s). Show the world who you are as an ace!! Emphasis on intersectionality is highly encouraged. This is an opportunity to highlight gender, race, religion, disabilities, and other communities that intersect with asexuality!
'83. Cis female who had mild gender dysphoria until close to the age of 24. White, dinaric subtype. Serbian. Agnostic - I like all the stuff that involves trees and nature, and I believe people can be connected in many ways, but the concept of a central deity escapes me, unless it's something from Last of the Starmakers. Able-bodied, unless one counts things such as mild scoliosis and strabismus on one eye to be a disability. I have an endocrine disorder that may or may not give me diabetes type 2 or LADA in the end, this made me barely capable of anything for years. Feminist with common sense.
I have a single heart, though.
My ace-card is not the ace of diamonds like it should be, because I don't know where my playing cards are. Instead of it, it's the four of hearts. I was at my friend Maja's last month when I told her and her children that I am going to pull a card from the deck and that it's going to be "I dunno, the four of hearts". And...it was. I think that's pretty cool.
Why am I doing this? There are not many adult asexuals on the internet, so I thought that encouraging other thirty-somethings that there is nothing to be ashamed of would make sense. And, of course, there are so many younger aces. We exist, despite all the erasure and the public's attempt to dismiss us as people in denial, assume we're religious freaks, prudes and whatever else is their defense mechanism against something that they could understand, but choose not to.
And I feel like all possible cards are being revealed these days, so why not?
tl;dr.
I'm a grey/gray asexual, leaning a bit to the aromantic side. As in, I don't mind romantic love, but I don't need it to be a complete person. And my experience of sexual attraction is very, very, very limited...to the point it's a trope. Or a trap!
It's OK. Admiral Ackbar is ace, too!
While I cherish interpersonal relationships in general and they matter to me a lot, I never felt lonely without a man, I was never an insert-a-man-here-so-i-can-be-complete type of a person. My aesthetic attraction to people is pretty limited, too. E.g. I can say that the male model in the Carolina Herrera perfume commercial is handsome, but that won't make me obsess over him. I am far more likely to consider people I love and appreciate, my friends and my relatives beautiful, regardless of their gender, age and pretty much any factor, ever. I think that what started off as "proper" attraction that apparently won't leave me at this point - and believe me, I tried to shake it off, shake it off - probably morphed into that.
In all my relationships, most of which were nowhere near traditional I faked attraction and convinced my way into it, likely thinking that I owe something to somebody. I also tended to think that, if somebody shows some interest, I had to reciprocate, because I have to "become normal". That could have ended badly. But it didn't.
Oh, and I was agender/neutrois for a long time.
The Aces come in all possible suits.
Wait, do you actually want the long version? OK. There you go. Why not. This one also includes a battle with anxiety, an endocrine disease and depression as a side effect of that disease.
The Beginnings
As a kid, I imitated what I would see in cartoons and on TV, perhaps it's a good proof of how limited television programme in the 1980s and early 1990s was in pre-split Yugoslavia. I loved having my photos taken in that "prayer" pose, I thought it was cool because cartoon characters were doing it. This is where I learned that one had to have crushes, too. I would pick cute boys, usually older than me, to crush on - whatever was that supposed to mean.
I was five when the son of our family friends and I did some French kissing under the desk in my bedroom. He asked me to marry him and I said yes. He had a condition: that we get naked after our wedding. I imagined a naked couple prancing with all their bits out in front of their wedding guests and I said no. A week later, he "married" another little girl. I assumed that she had no shame about being naked at her wedding.
I found out how babies were born when I was in the second grade. Prior to that, I read a book that mentioned that "the seed in the father has to reach the mother" and I assumed the father randomly polinates the mother. The educational cartoon I saw with my grandmother was terrifying and it involved two naked green space bears eloping. The female space bear's father was a king and he apparently realised why they ran away and actually wiped a tear. The next scene showed the space bears making out and the male had a member shaped like a form-spring. That was scary! What was scarier was the end of the cartoon: it turned out that a granny was telling this to two of her grandchildren. My...my grandmother never told me anything about spring-form wee-wees!
Around this time, I had an actual platonic crush on what basically is a cartoon animal - Teebo the Ewok. In the little-known Ewoks animated series, he was presented an unusually gentle, slightly less masculine character with interests fairly similar to mine - magic, poetry and arts. He was helping others, saving animals He had a girl lusting over him, she was completely crude compared to him, but in my head, I thought that - of course - it was impossible for her to be into the famed Wicket W. Warrick, the leading character in the show, the one of the manly Ewoks or Paploo, the show-off. In my seven year old mind, they lacked gentle mannerisms, general innocent cuteness and were more like the boys at school, my über-macho father and well, most men.
Kindness, gentleness and pagan-esque magic are in vogue.
Last year, trying to figure out how I got myself into my twenties and if about a third of my life ever made sense, I revisited the cartoon and realised that, yes, I can see why I liked this character so much. I am not fond of 'ships or fanspeak in general - to me it's categorisation and a desire to rule and fit concepts into labelled boxes...but do I ship Teebo and Latara? I totally do.
Following my discovery of sexual and romantic concepts, I drew quite a lot of nonsensical pornography. The most notable one involved a boy obsessed with taking baths and he would always get his genitals stuck in the bath tub drain. I'm not even sure what that was, but that's got to have hurt. I think I found the concept of sex and romance funny, the same way toilet humour is funny. I probably found it fascinating, too; though the concept of pleasure was escaping me. Pleasure was about drawing, writing poetry and stories, duh.
I was picking a classmate to crush on every couple of months. There was one who was my alleged crush for a while. We sat together and since he was - pardon me - kinda confused and absent-minded, I was saving him from failing classes, basically. We were never involved in any way, though he'd always be the first to come to my birthday parties, which was our only interaction outside of school. The last I heard of him, he commented "beautiful" on a photo of a mutual Facebook friend, where she was putting band-aid on her wound. That was weird. And, you know, I doubt that he knew how Picasso met Dora Maar. He was just...dopey.
Adolescence (Doesn't Make Sense)
When I was eleven, I met a boy on a vacation in Greece. He was going by Willy. We may have seen each other properly clothed once or twice on the course of two weeks. On all other occasions, I was wearing a two-piece polka-dot swimsuit or an one-piece blue one and he had black briefs. That meant absolutely nothing to me. All I wanted to do was to mock his unusually small feet and play typical children's games with him and his sister, while talking in butchered English. He was smart, sweet and I saw him as a friend. A week into the said vacation, Willy told me he loved me and I attempted to drown him (!). Can't remember what were his excuses and explanations, but I think I traumatised him. On the last day, I brought him a piece of paper and a pen and, in-between two sessions of crazed jumping against the waves on the Pagasetic Gulf's busiest beach, we exchanged our addresses. We started writing to each other and, though we lost contact a couple of times, we remain in touch even more than two decades later. He beats me at Words with Friends because he majored in English. Screw you, Willy. Screw you.
On the same vacation, the two girls I was hanging out year after year, were beginning to drift away from me, to the point where they were slightly hostile. My mother told me that they were jealous because I had a boyfriend and because my hair would go strawberry blonde in the summer and the two girls had and still have hair that is almost black. One of them is dying her hair strawberry blonde now, so maybe that was true.
But...a boyfriend? What?
Mind you, this was also one month before my menarche. I should and could have been high on hormones. Earlier this year, I stumbled upon a website called Missy Younglove and what I saw there was an eye-opener. Kids actually feel that sexual at 10-12 and they actually did everything that is there to be done? I...I had no idea.
Teenage dreams in a teenage circus?!
Puberty freaked me out more than it should have. I was one year younger than my 1982-born school mates and I had a fully feminine figure by the time I was thirteen, the kind of a body you see in classic era Hollywood flicks and despite my strong anxiety that would cause me to punch myself in presence of others who were actually cheering on me, had I expressed any desire to have a man, I think somebody would've come along and used me, as simple as that.
At the same time, I stood out. In a bad way. I didn't act like a girl...not that I was aware of how much mannerisms my girl friends were copying until my father, out of all people, told me that I "only look feminine when I am fixing my hair." I was not open to the idea of wearing bras. I stopped wearing dresses and skirts by my teens, same goes for anything sleeveless and two-piece swimsuits. I was not being seen as a girl, my male classmates would say explicit stuff about the female ones around me. I was a thing, literally. There were many times I would call myself an "it", but nobody saw that as alarming, because my initials happen to be precisely that - I.T.
It was ironic and strange. I entered puberty early and girls were slut-shaming me for having actual breasts when they had none, they kept on telling me that I wiggle my ass when I'm walking, that it shows because I'm wearing shirts that don't cover it. There was a time when my jacket remained locked in a bus on a road trip and a friend who was not cold did not want to lend me her hoodie because the boys from other classes would then see her ass.
A couple of years later, they were wearing actual provocative clothes and were perfectly aware of it and I was slut-shaming them. More often than not, I would've been genuinely disappointed and shocked by my friends wearing bras. Yes, it went that far. And my rationalised dysphoria and asexuality did not look different than their culturological hypocrisy.
Neither of these things were OK. The society puts too much value in being attractive. It's scary.
AVEN was founded when I was nineteen. I did not know of it, but I was using the term "asexual" to refer to myself.
Confused Young Adult
At the brink of my young adult years, I had an online romance with a friend in another country, whom I met through common interest in my decoy-crush. He did not have a preference at this point, I think. He was trying it with another girl each couple of weeks and I think many people do this. We were "together" for two months. There was no funny business. Each time he'd say something even remotely sexual, I would be scared. He had three proper relationships and one tragic lost love he never confessed anything to after me and married the third person.
Later that year, a close friend cornered me and basically told me to admit having a really strong attraction to a person of the opposite sex. My reply was probably something in the lines of seeing that person as some sort of an innocent animal in a petting zoo, an elf or an unicorn. When I woke up for my first romantic dream some months later, I was freaking out. I rewind the film throughout my teenage and pre-teenage years and realised that I always had an awkward
reaction
attraction to that person. And I hated myself. I was too old for it, too.
A photo my friend took while teasing me. She wanted proof.
So, I was ashamed of finding somebody like, really attractive? Biig deal! Well, it was not the only issue. I was also not female in my mind.
By the time I was twenty-three, I had what I am now aware was gender dysphoria. In 2015, dealing with it would have probably lead me to a period of time as genderqueer leaning towards neutrois. The internet was not what it is today in 2006 and I had no idea what was going on with me. There were no tumblr. blogs on that to help me. My actual endocrine condition, which leads to diabetes in about half of cases, may have contributed to it, since it does cause a form of depression and brain fog. My anxiety, which is not co-morbid to the condition, and the fact that I was still a bit of a puncher (as in, hitting my head against things or with fists) were making me assume I was criminally insane. During this point in time, I had my own personal demon, who later sent hordes of people to attack me on her behalf - that was making me feel even more insane.
So, gender dysphoria? How does that feel like? I guess it varies from person to person and it depends on what they're to discover. To spare you details, all female body parts were alien to me and the fact that I had them was scaring me. I wanted to be rid of them. They were subject to punching sometimes, when my head and face weren't. I heard of transgender people, but I did not feel like one - I did not want to be a man, I wanted to be a nothing in particular. By that point, nobody I knew was actually reading me as a girl, despite, you know, chest, rear-end, long hair, narrow waist and big hips. My clothes were whatever was fitting, because I didn't care. I did not own a single dress or a skirt. I was still freaked out by the shape of bras and I could accept wearing only a completely flat sports kind of thing, so I would not get unwanted attention.
People were not reading me as interested in men either. My own family did not even ask me to put rosemary branches on guests at my cousin's wedding. To this day, they keep on drifting away from me, and I believe that they think I am a lesbian who could groom a handful of beloved children into it. A bisexual friend - whom I adore otherwise - told me she was available before she came to visit me. Among other things, she remarked that I was suspicious because the man I told her of seemed suspicious in some way, too. During the said visit she figured out that I did not even register standing in front of pornographic images of women at the bus station. They were invisible to me.
Things kept on getting worse both physically and mentally. And no doctor wanted to help me. I was told that I was fat and lazy, right before I inexplicably lost a lot of weight without any kind of a diet or exercise regime. I was also told to have more sex. At this point, asexuality spectrum was barely being defined and the identities such as grey-ace were not widely known, so I thought I was a hysterical female and, yup, a heterosexual who is too ugly to find anybody. The fact that I did not even want to find somebody back then was escaping me, too. Hey, did somebody say amatonormativity?
My dysphoria disappeared in presence of the innocent unicorn I had a thing for. I am not sure if there is any logic to that. I basically accepted the fact that I was a girl in her twenties overnight. And I never doubted it since then. I no longer had a problem with my female body and the fact that people may use the scary gendered words to refer to me.
Close to turning 24, out of dysphoria
Sadly, this opened a lot of new issues. It was all written on my face that I was a girl and that resulted in a lot of unwanted attention. Later that same month, a farmers' market worker offered his son to me and some creep at Mc Donald's wanted me to share an ice cream cone with him. I know all about that myth of women glowing on this or that occasion, but this...this was ridiculous. My newly-found confidence does not equal green light, geddit?
Stupidly enough, I was going back and forth between calling myself an asexual and heterosexual. I thought I was no longer eligible for asexuality.
Over the following years, I was a complete mess. I had intense flings with a handful of men slightly younger than me, I was almost manic about the idea of a relationship. It would have made me normal, dammit. At least one of these men was genuinely interested in me and though he probably lead me on a downward spiral after I lost my father to cancer in 2010, I am super-grateful to whatever powers that he left for somebody else.
And know what? He was checking me out when I bumped into him in the grocery store the other day? I could tell his wife, but I won't. His behaviour is cringe-worthy and normalised solely because he's a man.
For reasons I cannot quite put my finger on, I nearly convinced myself that I hated the unicorn and that the unicorn hated me - which could not be further from truth - and I stuck around, remaining extremely passive-aggressive and malcontent for no apparent reason. There were incredibly good things coming my way...I attributed them to my insanity. The amount of shame I feel about that would have probably caused me to punch myself against the wall if I was still self-harming. If the Unicorn wanted to punch me in the face himself, he would have all the right to.
The Present Time
At the end of 2011, when another one of my attempted relationships failed and when a bisexual flame's likely eff buddy started to harass me online, somebody recommended me a social worker in a family centre. The social worker called me a psychopath, told me to use male prostitutes and see what that would be like and said that I was boy-crazy. But I wasn't. I spent the last two months of that year barely going out and taking benzos left over from my dad to be even able to go outside. I'm surprised how come I didn't get addicted.
I ended up crying to my GP and she offered me to see an actual psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed me with histrionic personality disorder. I looked up that at home and I was scared - that could not have been me. I never did anything inappropriate, all of it sounded like the above mentioned flame's eff buddy, she once rubbed her breast against my sneakers! I thought that there was no way out for me, that I will forever be insane.
Around the same time, I was sent to a gyn for an echo as well, but she discriminated me over not having had children yet, I hit her on the hand at some point during the echo and she revenged me by not telling me that I exhibit serious symptoms of a condition that can lead to diabetes, cancer and major depression. In fact, it was only April 2014 when I started receiving treatment for the said condition, by which time I was on the lower border of obese once again.
'nuff said.
Over the next years, I developed a great relationship with the therapist I was assigned. To this day, D.Š. is my #1 hero and I love her immensely. She was the first person to show me the light at the end of the tunnel, after nearly three decades of hell. After my second appointment with the neuropsychiatrist, I was un-diagnosed with HPD and diagnosed with anxiety and what they thought was depression at that point.
At the age of 30, I joined the message board about my favourite band. On there, I met one of my current best friends and her other half. Their stories were a lot like mine in some way, yet completely different. I also met a lot of LGBTQ people there. What was notable is that only a handful of us are older than twenty-five or so. It makes me wonder how many people of my age and older than me are living in shame, guilt and fear. At the same time, I am happy to see how many options are there for young people to understand themselves better and figure out who they are, whom they're into - if anybody - and how are they going to go about it - if they want to.
Just to be clear, that does not include "incels", people who are "forever alone" and similar nonsensical concepts. I could not care less about those who think they're entitled to having a partner and that somebody owes them sex. I could not care less about those who think all LGBTQ people are barfing rainbows, either. All those people need to move beyond the stereotypes first. Maybe it's not their fault, but I don't necessarily pity them.
2014 was the year I sorted myself out physically and it caused me to be emotionally numb at first, wondering about all the life I missed due to incompetent therapists, biased doctors and just about everybody messing with me. Despite this, I managed to remove a lot of negative influences from my life, I started cycling again and I befriended two demigoats over there in UK.
2015 ended up being the year I started out as a heartless monster, but I will be ending it as a complete person. There have been four defining points so far. It started out with two women sending me comforting messages - one of them became one of my closest friends. Another defining point for me was the first time a friend of a friend reached to me when I broke down in February/March without a particular reason. The third defining point was, as strange as this may be, a dream I had at the end of August.
Summa Summarum
Today is Thursday, November 26th 2015. I've been quite happy this week. I've been quite happy this month. A cishet couple is discriminating me on a message board, aided by another cishet woman who presented herself as my confidante earlier this year and is - ironically - in a somewhat non-amatonormative relationship, but I don't care. They're the ones looking like apes in cages, they need to update their beliefs. I am strong. I have those who love me and support me.
This is the first year of my life that I have constantly had money of my own. And I have never been more proud of being able to earn it myself. There was a point when I was making way too much, but I never went to the dark side and became greedy. In comparison, in 2012 I was so poorly that I accepted money for something I would never, absolutely never accepted money far.
My anxiety is pretty good compared to what it used to be and I continue to work on it. I don't take any medicines for it, but I have learned helpful relaxation techniques. I also know whom to confide to when upset.
My endocrine condition is much better. As of this summer/autumn, I'm in the normal weight range and I eat healthy most of the time - not because I starve myself, but because I listen to what my stomach is telling me. Metformin helps, too.
Doubts about not being female are long gone, because - in my case - I think they were related to the way the society sees you and what they want from you and my lack of willingness to fit into the box. I have no problem with people use the words such as "woman" or even "girl" to refer to me, though it's not necessarily good. I stay away from gendered words as much as possible when talking about other people, though. I own a couple of skirts, though I prefer shorts in the summer. My swimsuits are one-pieces, but I'd call them elegant I accepted the idea of having an actual hair style in 2011 or so. I'm OK with bras, though not fond of straps showing. When it comes to clothes, hair and all that stuff that should not matter but it does, I have a distinctive style and if you offend it, I will offend you - plain and simple. I could nor care less about being sexy, hot or whatever - I like the way I look, I adore all of me, but I am not out there to be liked and desired by random strangers.
This is me in November 2015
I have not gone to a pride parade - they're very risky here and they seem to be trans-exclusive, since the trans folks had their own protest the most recent time instead - but maybe someday I will. Or I won't. I would prefer to help those who are living through their personal hell than to carry the banner.
What gender am I into? All my nonsensical crushes, shallow relationships and flirts were biologically male. The Unicorn is, too, though reducing how my feelings for that person evolved to OMG A MAN!11 would be oversimplifying things to a ridiculous degree.
I am probably able to fall in love with anything and everything in my own way, either that or - more likely - I am not capable of make a difference between falling in love and just being way too fond of people in any other way. There was a time I yearned for a bridge. Yes, a bridge. There was a time I mourned the loss of a tree the way somebody would mourn the loss of their spouse. Whatever and whomever I love, I never stop loving them, unless nothing even remotely similar to love was involved in the first place.
My definition of love may not match yours. And frankly, I couldn't care less.
Thank you, mom. Thank you, dad, if afterlife exists. Thank you, Judi, the dog. Thank you, Miki, the tree. Thank you, close friends, especially the witch and all my goats. Thank you, Graysen and the rest of LGBTQ clique on this message board I visit, for helping me figure out myself in my early thirties, since I didn't do so in my twenties. Thank you, Unicorn, for having somehow saved me from hurting my body and my mind further. Thank you, the Ace community. Thank you, assholes who won't let us be, because...know what? You cannot stop us!
The rest is still unwritten.