The Little Prince and the Fox

From the last chapter, “Where are we going? Where have we been?”, of Angela Chen’s book “Ace”: 

“

Adrienne Rich wrote that compulsory heterosexuality rendered lesbian possibility invisible. It made lesbian possibility “an engulfed continent that rises frequently to view from time to time only to become submerged again”. It will take courage for straight feminists to question the natural state of heterosexuality, but Rich promises that the rewards will be great: “A freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another great silence, new clarity in personal relationships”. 

These are also the rewards of working toward ace liberation, because compulsory anything is the opposite of freedom. Ace liberation is a complicated term. Asexuality is not inherently politically progressive. Not everyone who identifies as asexual identifies as politically progressive, and that does not make their asexuality any less legitimate. But the goals of the ace movement are progressive, and the potential of the ace movement is greater than aces being more visible in the culture and more important than aces proving that, except for this one thing, we’re just like everyone else. As CJ Chasin, the activist, has said, aces push the envelope. Once it is okay for aces to never have sex, it becomes more acceptable for everyone else who isn’t ace too. Ace liberation will help everyone. 

It comes in rejecting sexual and romantic normalcy in favor of carefully considered sexual and romantic ethics. The meaning of sex is always changing and the history of sexuality is complex. Compulsory sexuality and asexuality have changed across time and space; they can, and will, change again. The goal, at least to me, is that one day neither the DSM criteria nor the asexuality-as-identity will be necessary. It will be easy to say yes or no or maybe — to sexuality, to romantic relationships — without coercion, without further justification, without needing a community to validate that answer. Sexual variety will be a given and social scripts will be weakened; sex will be decommodified. 

The goal of ace liberation is simply the goal of true sexual and romantic freedom for everyone. A society that is welcoming to aces can never be compatible with rape culture; with misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia; with current hierarchies of romance and friendship; and with contractual notions of consent. It is a society that respects choice and highlights the pleasure that can be found everywhere in our lives. I believe that all this is possible.

“

(I wish I had Angela Chen’s optimism right now…)

Along the lines of CJ Chasin, I would also like to add: “Once it is okay for aros to never have romance while still having deep, caring, committed relationships, it becomes more acceptable for everyone else who isn’t aro too.”

Most of the people I know have someone to go home to: a spouse, partner(s), housemate(s), child(ren). 

I don’t. 

That weighs on me. 

As much as I enjoy and even need a lot of time & space by myself, as difficult as it can be for me to compromise with other people’s schedules and/or needs on a daily basis, I would like to live with, or at least share more time with, someone compatible and close to me. 

I like to make space for (a) close friend(s) visiting me. I enjoy cooking and eating together. It feels comfortable and cosy to relax watching a movie with a friend at the end of the day — I’d rather cook and eat and watch a movie with a compatible friend/housemate instead of always do it by myself. 

I’ve learned to do things by myself, to “turn loneliness into solitude”, to “focus on my own goals to keep myself going”, but it’s not easy. It’s a big, almost continuous, effort — and sometimes it’s really sad and painful.

I have built my life and society works in such a way that I have no one with whom to make big plans, no one with whom I really “share my life”. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to do it in the way that most of my friends do it with their romantic/sexual/nesting partners. But still I do want and need to do it more than I am doing now (& have been doing for so long). 

I was able to hold it together yesterday afternoon at the brewery. I drove my buddy home and them I drove back home myself together with my close European friend. The moment I started driving home, I broke down. Tears streamed down my face the whole drive back, for over half an hour. I was an emotional wreck. 

Fortunately, I was still able to have a lovely evening with my European friend visiting — a priority especially since they were leaving today. And over dinner I was able to open up with them and finally say some things out loud that I’ve thought before but never had the courage to admit. I finally admitted out loud that I’m afraid I am more attached to this climbing buddy and some other of my close friends than they are to me. And it’s not because they care about me less but because of the importance that I give to friendship that is so “non-normative”, so uncommon in its depth & intensity & commitment. Because I experience relationships and love differently. I don’t feel sexual or romantic attraction for people and thus I am not interested in that type of closeness or that type of relationship. But I do feel affection and love and attachment. I do need and want closeness and commitment and sharing. So as I poured out my heart to my European friend last night, and as they asked me some very good (& difficult) questions, I started having more clarity around what I actually want and need from some of my closest relationships/friendships. 

Ideally, I would like to know how important I am to the people I care for, how much and in what way they care for me. But that is probably too vague a question for many persons, especially for AMAB/socialized-male people. Concretely, what I want and need is for some of my closer friends and buddies to make more plans with me and/or to reach out to me themselves to suggest things instead of leaving it always up to me. 

In so many of my relationships, even some that are really close/solid, I feel we don’t plan anything “serious” or “significant” together. We’re there for each other for practical things and/or mutual support like house- and/or cat-sitting, moves or doctors’ appointments (for which I’m very grateful). There’s some planning around fun things together but that hardly ever goes beyond a shared meal, a walk&talk, a day outing. Once every blue moon there’s something more significant like the weekend in Fruita for my protest race or the Ragnar trip or the visit of my European friend now. And these events fill me with a joy that is so beautiful that it can hardly be described. But these events are also few and far between and often spontaneous or impromptu, not within an “agreed-upon relational dynamics”. And that’s what I miss, that’s what I need, that’s what I would like. 

As I unpacked these difficult emotions with my European friend over dinner last night, I realized that I would like to have established, mutually-agreed-upon “bigger events” to plan and share with some of my closest friends. It could even be just a one-weekend trip a year with each one of these four or five persons, but I would really like — and need —to have those moments, separately, with that handful of people that are dearest to me. 

Yes, it hurts that these people make such plans with their “partners” and maybe with other friends but not with me. It hurts that no one makes such plans with me. It hurst that all I get is an evening out or a day hiking/climbing. It was lovely to have my European friend here for almost a week and share things — my world —  and make plans with them. 

And it was good, albeit difficult, that they asked me what I fear from telling my other friends that I feel this way. The reply to that basically amounts to this: “I’m afraid of asking for too much, of my feelings being misunderstood (because of how we’re socialized/conditioned around close relationships) and thus scaring away my friends and losing them”.

But as things are, I’m making do with crumbs when what I would need is a full meal.

I’m feeling sad. And lonely. 

I knew this would happen and I would do it all over again, I regret nothing, it was all worth it. But still, now it hurts. The loneliness is as thick and real as a wall. 

As I’ve expressed over and over again, this loneliness I experience is both existential and circumstantial. But the difference now is that I refuse to ascribe it wholly to my own “attachment wounds” or to seek the solution through individual therapy aimed at “fixing me & my wounds”. This loneliness is here because of how I function or experience relationships/closeness (as an aro ace person) and because of how society functions or organizes itself around relationships/closeness. 

The loneliness and sadness right now are caused mainly by the departure of one of my dearest friends from grad school who just visited me here in Colorado from Europe for nearly a week after not having seen each other (but still having been in touch and close) for seven years. I was expecting this loneliness and sadness, I accounted for them when this friend & I were planning their visit here, knowing it would be totally worth it. And, in fact, it was — it is. 

This circumstantial loneliness, though, is aggravated by a more existential loneliness that was sparked in me by a conversation with my closest climbing buddy yesterday afternoon. Relaxing with a beer after our hike, he shared some very personal things, including possible plans of moving to California. He’s mentioned changing job and possibly moving away before but the way he talked about it yesterday sounded much more imminent, much more realistic, much more real. And as I listened to him talk and tried to give him the advice that a “good friend” would, parts of me felt stabs inside, thoughts rushing through my head of how much I would miss him while he would just move away with no further thought about me. What pained/pains me the most, though, was/is the fact that he — as almost everyone else I know — is making all these plans together with someone, whereas I’m always making my big plans by myself. He’s making these plans with his romantic/sexual/nesting partner and possibly even with some other close buddies. And while I rationally understand that he has more “history” with these other buddies than with me, it still hurts that he might make big life plans with them (along with his romantic/sexual/nesting partner) but not with me. As it hurts that I have a few other close friends who make big plans with their romantic and/or nesting partners but not with me. 

I have built my life and society works in such a way that I have no one with whom to make big plans, no one with whom I really “share my life”. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to do it in the way that most of my friends do it with their romantic/sexual/nesting partners. But still I do want and need to do it more than I am doing now (& have been doing for so long). 

“The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” [Lao Tzu]: even if that journey might be “just” a 13.5-mile race on trail (and not add up to thousands of miles). 

Almost a year ago, in October 2023, I skipped, i.e. avoided doing, a race (half-marathon on trail) because while it offered a non-binary category to register, it did not include any awards at all for non-binary participants. I found the inequality still so glaring, that I skipped the race after having had a long back-and-forth via email with one of the organizers (there was an earlier acquaintance with this local running organization because I had volunteered with them at a race the previous year, in Sept. 2022). 

Then, nearly three months ago, I did that half-marathon trail race in Fruita, CO without registering as a sign of protest, with the support of friends, because that race didn’t even have a non-binary category for me to sign up (let alone non-binary awards). 

After that race, in May, I met up in person with the guy (self-identifying as “white, straight, cis-male”) from the local running organization that offers a non-binary category to register but no awards for non-binary participants in their races and we had a lengthy, and very nice, conversation about inclusion in competitions & running events and how his organization could implement it better. He promised me that he would talk to the co-founder also warning me, though, that he couldn’t promise me any changes for the rest of this race season. 

Now, eager to do the half-marathon trail race that this local organization puts on for the end of August, I checked the event’s webpage hoping to sign up; but once again, their race offered a non-binary category to register and yet still no awards at all for non-binary participants. So I reached out again to the organizer with whom I had talked, pointing out this issue of inequality again, and he admitted that, although he had talked to his colleague/co-founder a lot, he hadn’t been able to convince him. He told me honestly that while he could sympathize with me on an emotional level, he was struggling to find the right “rational” words necessary to convince his colleague/co-founder, and he asked me to help. So we brainstormed for over half an hour on the phone, and then I finally said, almost exasperated: “It’s not just gender, it’s gender identity, we call it gender identity, and it really is a core part of our core identity, not just a ‘physical attribute’!” 

And apparently I happened to find the words that worked: he said, “OK, I think that will convince Nick”. 

And YES, it did convince his colleague/co-founder: the website for this race has been updated to announce not only a non-binary category to register but also awards for the first three non-binary participants who place overall, just like the female &male categories. 

I did it. 

Hell, yeah — I did it! 

I did it because I persevered, I insisted, and I also made myself vulnerable enough to talk about delicate gender issues and answer lots of tricky questions with someone who’s neither queer nor a close friend. 

And once again, I didn’t do it alone: I found an(other) ally to help me advance this cause. 

It might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but we need to start somewhere and I’ll be damned if I don’t do my share in making the necessary changes happen!

[Trigger warning: sexuality.]

I have conflicted feelings/thoughts around the phrase “coming out” — e.g. why do queer people have to “come out” while straight people don’t, i.e. being straight is taken for granted, as the norm?!? I usually prefer to describe my “coming outs” as “coming into myself more” — that’s a phrase that aligns with me better. 

Today, however, I have a “coming out” to make, maybe the hardest for me yet. And it’s a “coming out” rather than a “coming into myself more” because I’m still grappling with this truth myself.

I have a high sex drive — I always have had: at age seventeen something was switched on in my hormones (not towards anyone in particular, just internally & physically within me) and it’s never been switched off apart from some sparse phases. 

I have a strong aesthetic sense or drive, i.e. I can feel strong aesthetic attraction (like the feelings towards beautiful paintings or statues), especially towards male/masculine types and androgynous bodies.

I am physically (& sexually?) attractive, at least by current, Western standards. 

In our binary society soaked in pervasive compulsory sexuality and brain-washed into damaging amatonormativity, this has led me and those around me to believe that I’m a very sexual allosexual person. And I went from being considered a “dyke” in high school (because I presented boyish and apparently didn’t date any boys but only hung out with them as buddies) to being perceived as a (attractive) “straight girl” to being a (handsome) “gay boy”. 

But the truth is that I’m actually asexual. Or maybe gray-A. But definitely on the asexual spectrum. And also aromantic. 

All of a sudden, everything about my close relationships makes sense to me. And yet, somehow, it’s also hard for me to grapple with and accept. 

I still haven’t integrated all the emotions that this is bringing up for me, and I still need to get more familiar with the weeds of the terminology and definitions. And I don’t have the emotional or mental energy to go into all the details just yet. 

It feels super scary and painful to make this “coming out” now but it also feels necessary to me, like relieving myself of a burden: I am an aromantic, asexual (or gray-A) person with an internally-driven high libido and the capacity, or orientation, to feel strong camaraderie and/or intense “platonic” love, and thus deep commitment, towards my close friends & buddies.

[Trigger warning: loss, grief.]

A year ago, I was spending my very last, beautiful and yet heart-wrenching, days together with my European queer ex-lover before they returned to Europe and our relationship, de facto, ended. 

Honestly, during this whole month of July, I haven’t been thinking about this much — not nearly as much as I thought I would. The grief that I feared would hit me hard for all the memories of the intense events from last July both around my father and connected to my European queer ex-lover never materialized. I think the trip to Salt Lake City that helped me reset in June and all the “self-therapy” I’ve been doing in the past couple months along with the sparse but meaningful presence of friends have softened the pain, and the loneliness and grief have been mostly kept at bay. 

But grief, once we experience it, will stay with us forever — it just becomes part of us and will come back to bite unexpectedly. 

It’s biting me today — and maybe not so unexpectedly, given the time of year it is and the fact that yesterday I had dinner with a friend/colleague whom I met through my European queer ex-lover because she collaborates with them on a scientific project, which brought the memories of my European queer ex-lover back more sharply. 

There’s also something else, though, something that is still hard for me to wholly put into words, something that I can feel there as a seed inside me and might grow into yet another “coming out” sometime in the near future. It has to do with my “relationship to relationships”. The seed has been there for as long as I can remember and, in fact, it’s the main reason I started this blog in the first place. But now it’s as if it were getting “newly fertilized” through the book “Ace” by Angela Chen. I’m recognizing so many of my emotions and beliefs in this book and it feels very validating but also scary and somehow makes me see so many of my intimate relationships through a different lens, giving some of my past relationships, including the one with my European queer ex-lover, an even deeper meaning, a stronger importance. And making me question even more sharply, when it comes to close relationships, “Where do I go from here?” 

Today, my boy-chest turns 18 months old — or maybe I should say, or would rather say, 18 months young! 

Part of my celebration for it included going swimming at the local outdoor pool and letting my whole body, wearing only short, tight Speedo-like trunks, bask in the sunshine and revel in the water. 

I think swimming bare-chested, and letting everyone see me “topless” at the pool, is the most powerful and gratifying of the feelings since having had gender-affirming top-surgery — even more liberating and validating than climbing or running bare-chested. I don’t know why exactly, but there’s something that feels incredibly powerful and empowering for me to walk into (or out to) a swimming-pool and feel the water wash over my whole body with only a tiny Speedo in the way. Part of it has to do just with me, my body, my sensations; part of it, though, I’m sure also has to do with it being a public, and often relatively crowded, space. Doing it in front of other people feels more assertive than if I were doing it just by myself. And there’s also the transgressive aspect for me that is present at the pool but absent if I’m climbing or running bare-chested: wearing only a tight Speedo (unlike climbing pants or running shorts) makes my whole body very “clear”, almost as if I were naked: between the scars on my chest and the shape of my groins, it’s pretty clear that I’m nonbinary trans — and I love that. 

This confident, empowered, and almost challenging attitude, though, hasn’t always been there for me, within me. On the contrary. I’ve struggled a lot to feel this ease with/in my nonbinary trans body. And sometimes it still disappears, when I least expect it. Like two days ago with the physical therapist. 

I’m doing physical therapy to recover from my thumb injury. The forms and restrooms at the PT center only have binary options, so the way I present & the way people consider me there is very “binary masculine”. Despite this, I have also done nothing to hide tears during some of our sessions when my thumb was particularly swollen & painful, saying “I’m a boy who cries”, and I’ve also talked about Pride events. I think my physical therapist knows I’m trans, but I’m not sure. So I had this weird feeling there of almost having to “keep up a façade” — maybe because I still have that old fear in me that if I admit I’m not a cis-male, then people will start misgendering me again. On Wednesday, I needed to show the physical therapist a concern about my right shoulder & shoulder-blade so I had to remove my T-shirt: so for the first time she saw me bare-chested and therefore saw (or, at least, could have seen) the scars on my chest, i.e. what to me feels like the “proof of my transness”. And all of a sudden I felt terribly naked: I felt vulnerable, almost ashamed, scared of being “discovered”. The physical therapist (who is a very nice cis-woman) needed advice on my shoulder from a colleague whom she went to call into the room (after asking for my permission). Her colleague — a cis-man, I think — arrived and I felt that vulnerability, that shame, that fear all over again. With both of them I felt the impulse to cover my chest, to cross my arms over my scars. I didn’t do that but I could feel myself hunching, not standing as upright, and definitely not as confident, as usual. It was weird, almost painful, and very disorienting for me. 

So when days like today happen and I feel the ease and confidence of inhabiting and showing to the world my nonbinary trans body, I will soak in every drop of that glory.

Last Wednesday, I spent most of the day with a dear friend whom I had met in California during the pandemic. They were here for several days to visit their partner’s family and made time to spend a day with me. It was one of those “gems” although it started out with me bursting into tears only a few moments after my friend arrived at my place here in Colorado. 

We had never seen each other outside of California and even since I’ve moved away we’ve seen each other only a couple of times when I’ve gone back to California. So seeing my friend here, in my new home or “my element”, was very special for me but also overwhelming. Several factors contributed to my hypersensitivity at my friend’s visit: the fact that I’ve been spending so much time by myself this summer, getting used to and even basking in my solitude as it’s feeling comfortable and safe, but also getting unused to interacting with people, especially on a close, intimate level; my fear of loss since this friend would then be going back to California and I probably won’t see them again until next year, at the earliest; my fear of sharing deep, intimate feelings or thoughts or emotions with this friend, which is something we usually do, but then also having to put up with the separation; hormones (damn them!). We got over the hump, though, and had a very nice day together. And I think three main factors contributed to this, three factors that I see being common to other relationships that feel particularly comfortable and/or safe to me: firstly, my friend said explicitly that we needn’t go deep into emotions if I/we didn’t feel like talking about them; then, the fact that we spent almost the whole day, i.e. many hours, together; and last but not least, that for part of the time we spent together we did active things together. 

I think these are all key factors that I see also in my close, comfortable relationships with my climbing (or hiking or running) buddies. Unlike the artist friend who visited me last week, these people are cis-men so for the most part they were socialized differently and not really encouraged or taught to “sit around and talk about emotions”. That actually turns out to feel much more comfortable and safe to me. The three or four cis-male buddies who are close to me and I do talk about emotions with one another, but it’s always while doing active things together. And most of the time we meet up, we’re spending many hours together, often a whole weekend day together, or at least a few hours at the gym and then happy hour together. Thus, our meetings have come to have some sort of built-in ritual: meet up and often carpool to some place together (or warm up at the gym), which provides a warm-up or ice-breaker to our meeting & relating to each other (what I was feeling the need for when my artist friend visiting from California showed up at my front door last week); share an activity together that gets us into our bodies, which provides a bonding time whether we talk about emotions or only about the weather; cool-down, either literally stretching after the workout or figuratively by going to get food and/or drinks together. I need these steps: they help me ease into the relationship and then ease back out of it; doing something active together helps me self-regulate (and probably helps both me & my buddies co-regulate together), if we talk about deep stuff; and spending several hours and/or possibly a whole (weekend) day together feels meaningful because it’s such a concrete, explicit commitment taking so much time out for each other. (The trip I did for the half-marathon activism/protest in April with a couple of friends was also this kind of experience for me.) 

I don’t know what all this means about me, my relationships, or how I function. I realize I’m in a phase where I’m really dissecting the way I relate to relationships — or maybe looking at things through different lenses and removing the filters that are usually given to us for relationships. To a certain extent, I’ve done this my entire life, but I think I’m doing it much more radically now, also thanks to one of my non-binary European friends who is ace and the books on asexuality they recommended to me and that I’ve started reading.

At this point, I’m feeling very confused about how I function in, and relate to, relationships; so this is just a sort of flow-of-consciousness ramble about some of the things I’m noticing that work (or don’t work) for me in close/intimate relationships.

In the second half of the first book of The Extraordinaries by TJ Klune, when Nick & his best friend Seth are still grappling with their own “beyond-platonic” feelings for each other, there’s a very touching moment when Nick cannot help himself and blurts out to Seth, “You make my heart so full I think I’ll die”. 

I know that feeling. I’m fortunate to say that I’ve experienced it quite a bit especially since moving to Colorado. 

For me, though, this feeling is platonic. I don’t want to say “only platonic” or “limited to the platonic level” because those wordings seem reductive or discounting of the depth or importance of the emotions & relationships & people involved. What I mean is that in my case, at least with the people involved now, the feelings and relationships are undoubtedly neither romantic nor sexual. They are, however, of paramount importance. They have a depth and breadth, an ease as well as a solidity and a commitment to them that they often make my heart so full that it feels like it will spill over. 

It feels like there’s so much love that I don’t know where to put it. 

These moments, these feelings, these people — they are gems. (And I’m so excited that one of my “European gems” will be visiting me here in a few weeks and will be able to meet one or two of my “Colorado gems”!) 

Yesterday morning when I woke up, I was feeling so lonely that I felt my heart would break, would just crack and bleed. But then, unexpectedly, one of my “Colorado gems” reached out to ask if we could meet up in the afternoon — and we did, going for a dip in the creek (our first “post-op topless baptism in the creek” together!) and spending some very meaningful time together, talking and empathizing and enjoying the beautiful summer weather. 

This morning I woke up exhausted. I felt like I should just take advantage of the bad weather forecast to skip the hike with my buddy and stay home. But my climbing buddy (who doesn’t really like to hike and is doing it as a way to keep up our connection) was determined to take the risk of bad weather to attempt having a day out with me, so we went. As we’ve done before, we defied the weather (& got lucky) and had a wonderful time together — not just hiking: the hike, as beautiful as it was, was an excuse. The gem was our “bro-time” together: the flowing conversation; the comfortable silences; the sex jokes; the laughter — oh, so much genuine laughter! And, as my buddy called it, another milestone we hit: after the hike, we went to get a late lunch at a place that doesn’t take credit cards so we had to get cash from the ATM at the back; as I got up from our table out front to go to the ATM inside, my buddy gave me his card and asked if I could get cash for him, too; “Sure, but don’t you have a PIN on your card?” I asked; “Yes”, he whispered, “it’s ****”, and then he added with a smile, “Look at us! I think we’ve hit another milestone”. And it’s true: I know we have.  

I love these people. These moments with them, these gems, make my heart so full that it’s hard to find words for them — or, maybe, words cease to matter.