[Trigger warnings: grief, loss; compulsory-sexuality mentality.]
The guy on my left during the second part of last week’s rehearsal with the gay men’s chorus had a tattoo on his inner left forearm that read: “Acceptance is the answer”.
I wonder if I’ll ever get there.
I’m definitely still in the stormy and painful part of the grief cycle with respect to my aro-ace identity.
It was a great relief to be able to talk about it, to pour my heart out, to someone — one of the few people I know in person — who really knows what I’m talking about. Not just a good friend who’ll ask me to explain it to them, but actually someone who knows first-hand what aro & ace mean, someone who really practices relationship anarchy and might even be able to point me to local aro-ace communities and/or resources if/when I’m ready for it. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to sit and talk about this to someone who really gets it — like I did with my nonbinary friend visiting me from Europe a month and a half ago. On Thursday afternoon, I was finally overwhelmed, got under the covers and sobbed: it was such a relief, albeit a lonely and painful relief, to be able to cry for what feels like a huge loss to me. And then yesterday afternoon, it was somewhat healing to sit and vent with this acquaintance/friend, as they just sat and listened, sat with me in my grief, in my pain, in my despair, in my anger.
I’m not sure the phases of the “grief cycle” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) are linear or progress separately from one to the other. I’m pretty sure I had a denial phase (although I wasn’t aware of it at the time) that has ended. And I’m not quite fully at the acceptance stage yet (& wonder whether I’ll ever achieve that). But the anger, bargaining, and depression phases seem a little mixed up to me, as if I were still shifting back and forth between them. A lot of my bargaining seems to be drawing on my being a sex-favorable ace and having a relatively high libido; it’s as if I had a voice in my head saying, “OK, I cannot and don’t want to do things like bars and datings apps and I struggle connecting to people on a level of sexual or romantic intimacy, but given the right circumstances I can have and even enjoy sex so I might still be able to connect with some persons on that level” — as if I were trying to salvage something or prove to myself that I’m not hopeless, not “completely broken”. Which is probably part of the reason I was (still am?) obsessing over the guy I like(d) at the gym: if I can feel sexual attraction towards someone, even if it happens just once in a decade, then maybe I can still feel that “spark” sometimes. I guess this is the bargaining: and bargaining induced by allosexual & compulsory sexuality brainwashing, so it would probably be healthier for me to get out of it as soon as I can.
All of the sadness and loneliness I’ve been feeling, along with the tears I was finally able to shed this week are definitely the depression stage of the grief cycle. But there’s also a lot of anger still. I still rage, “I don’t want to be this way! I’m OK with being nonbinary & trans but I really wish I weren’t aro-ace!” And, as my acquaintance/friend pointed out yesterday afternoon and my nonbinary European friend has also observed, this anger that people like me, like us, feel is due to how society functions around us: we’re not inherently wrong or “broken” or “to be fixed”, but society functions in a way that makes it seem that way and it is society that needs to change — not us — to be more equitable and inclusive for everyone.
But we’re still a long way from those changes and in the meantime my pain and my anger are real and I have to carry them and work through them, hopefully one day getting to the point where I can agree wholly, not just with my head but also with my heart/soul, with that guy’s tattoo: “Acceptance is the answer”…
And in the meantime try to have clearer conversations about our relational needs with my current friends, on the one hand, and on the other, try to find other aro and/or ace people…?
The Little Prince and the Fox 