#however I did sort through my internalised homophobia and stuff | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

elskamo · 3 years

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B and N for the fanfic asks (:

Thanks for sending me asks, I love it when that happens! If anyone else wants to ask me stuff (or if you wanna send more) the ask questions are here :)

B: Any of your stories inspired by personal experience?

Some of the things I’ve written have definitely drawn on emotions and experiences from my personal life. Scrolling through some of the work I’ve posted I can find a few prominent examples that stand out to me.

Day 2 of Aleduncan Week immediately comes to mind. The idea of that work was for Duncan to be detached from the LGBT+ community as well as having implied internalised homophobia. I distinctly remember feeling as though being out as LGB was a bad thing when I was a preteen, I also had a lot of internalised transphobia that I refused to address until after I started my first relationship in my late teens where I finally felt forced to come out. Duncan’s evaluation of his feelings (well, lack thereof) towards Courtney and Gwen is also reminiscent of my own struggle to identify exactly what I’m feeling towards others, I struggle a great deal to differentiate between platonic, romantic, and sexual love and often don’t realise what it was I’ve been feeling until things are too late and I’ve acted incorrectly. Alejandro’s short speech about the treatment of LGBT+ contestants on Total Drama also reflects some of my own resentment at not being able to see accurate or positive representation in media as well as my disappointment with people in my life who have either refused or still refuse to acknowledge my identity.

A lot of the articles I write for Humanistically Speaking talk about my personal experiences, normally I write about current events and problems however for my last article that was written for the February issue I gave an overview of my LGBT+ journey throughout the years for LGBT+ History Month (it takes place in February in the UK). I also had a few mini sagas and poems published during my teen years, not all of them have been uploaded to Tumblr but one in particular ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ that I did post on my blog is all about my thoughts and feelings during surfing therapy and how thankful I was for the volunteers that ran the program.

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

Hoo boy, what don’t I want people to write?

Aleduncan Week flopped a bit because the people who were going to take part weren’t able to (myself included) so a lot of the prompts that everyone voted for still don’t have any content written for them. I still have the half finished Fears/Guilty Pleasure fic on my old laptop to complete and post but haven’t yet started on Date Night/Double Date and Family/Wedding. I’d still love to see people write stuff for the prompts if they’d like to, I will never stop reblogging all the amazing content people make.

I was also taking part in TDWRiMo and wasn’t able to finish weeks 4 and 5, the idea for 4 is still bullet pointed on my old laptop but isn’t properly started. I also have the notes for my Love and Friendship Week prompts but again none of them have been started. I did also have an idea for a TDWT AU where Aleduncan are pretending to have crushes instead of just working together regularly but seeing as I skipped TDWT I’m going to have to do a lot of research or just plain disregard canon if I want to write that one, there’s likely many other writers who could do a better job with that idea than me.

I’ve been trying to branch out with the stuff I’m creating recently seeing as I tend to default back to doing the same sort of stuff over and over (at least in my opinion). As much as I love Duncney I see content for them all the time since they’re a popular canon ship, I seem to be making Aleduncan content the most however that’s because it doesn’t really pop up on my feed at all unless I ask people to post stuff which I feel guilty doing. I posted some sketches a few days ago with Scottney/Scourtney, Jock, and Crimsennui as they’re some of my other OTPs but I don’t see any content for them either; Jock seems to have fizzled out now that there’s a new Jo crackship, people generally dislike Scott and Courtney as a pairing, and I haven’t come across anyone that posts stuff for the goths. I have some Heathney and Bridgney drabbles planned since both pairings are growing on me, I don’t see much content for them but the stuff I have seen has been nice. Any of the ships I’ve mentioned here I’d love to see people write or make art for!

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sophiescarlet · 7 years

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Lengthy post on my sexuality, asexuality, and women’s repressed sexuality ahoy

Last night on Twitter, I came across a repost of this post about straight and queer women’s interactions. As it happened, the second paragraph - which is the most relevant to me and what I’m about to talk about - was what was in the image preview. I’m not going to post the whole thing, because it’s not really relevant and you can read it for yourselves at the source, but here’s the relevant portion:

if straight girls knew of even half of how much lesbians and bisexual girls hold themselves back and restrain themselves and dilute themselves in order to appear non-threatening and non-predatory to those same straight girls

once we’ve made you aware of our orientation, we barely allow ourselves to look at you and smile at a joke you just told, in case you’d assume we’re into you, just because we smiled at you once

Now, ignoring the “straight” part of that and the post’s larger commentary on homophobia among straight women (which is important commentary, just not what I’m talking about here), this was shockingly similar to my own feelings and actions.

Just the night before, I’d been at my church’s women’s group. It was only the second time I’ve gone, and it was the first time the one other girl around my age from our church went. When she showed up, I considered flirting with her. I wasn’t sure she was queer, but I figured it was likely since 1) she looked the part, and 2) a good number of the people at my church (a Unitarian Universalist church, to be precise) are queer. But I decided against it for the moment, which, thank God as it turns out, because eventually she mentioned that she is, indeed, gay - and engaged.

All of which is really just exposition for my main point: from that moment, I became hyperaware of how loudly I laughed when she said something funny, whether I angled myself toward or away from her. Which I always, always do when I’m worried a girl might think I like her, even if there’s no reason why she would. But until I saw that post last night, I’d always thought it was just me and my idiosyncrasies. Seeing that it was a common experience among queer women - even if applied to a rather narrower audience than I apply it to - has made me rethink a few things.

Now, I’ve always been like this. I can definitively remember doing it in high school, and I probably did even earlier. My point being, at that time I had no idea that I was a girl, or queer in any way. In some ways, I was conscious of it. As a (seeming) male, I didn’t want to intimidate women. I didn’t want to be part of that whole thing at all. And I know that I internalise SJ stuff way, way too much, beyond a point that’s at all healthy, and end up second-guessing myself far too much and too often. I always thought that was the root of it.

But I also know that from childhood, I internalised messages that were intended for women. Messages about body shape and how to behave and all those sorts of things. And now, now that I know other women do this too - probably including women who don’t have my hyper-SJ issue - I wonder if in fact there’s more to it.

One of the things that we teach women is to never impose. Sometimes I’m able to say fuck that and impose anyway. Other times, I struggle with it a lot. And my guess now is that that has a lot to do with why I act this way. I don’t want to impose on anyone by making them feel uncomfortable if they think I might have feelings for them. (Meanwhile, when I actually do have feelings for someone, I almost always blurt it out immediately.)

So those are all things I’m thinking about. But the real question for me has been, to what extent have I been covering up my sexuality to myself?

I’ve identified as acespec (asexual spectrum) since before I identified as bi, certainly before I began unraveling my transness. (I no longer identify as bi, btw; I identify as a lesbian. Which reminds me, I really need to write another post about why I think that happened. But again, irrelevant at the moment.) I’ve identified practically all along the spectrum: asexual, demisexual, gray-a, cupiosexual. Now I wonder, am I really, honestly acespec? Or have I been deluding myself all along, convinced by my own façade of disinterest?

On the one hand, I think I probably am on the spectrum somewhere. I’ve certainly never had the experience of looking at someone I don’t know and thinking, “I’d fuck them.” But on the other hand, I’ve had moments where I’ve felt sexuality in a way that made me... uncomfortable. (Which, as I think about it, may also have to do with my extremely sexphobic Catholic upbringing.) I was definitely sexually attracted to my former partner more than I ever wanted to admit. And it would explain why I’ve had such a hard time figuring out just where on the ace spectrum I fall.

Last night, I started to realise that yeah, I probably have been lying to myself for years about the extent of my sexuality. Maybe because of that Catholic upbringing, but even more because of my total discomfort with somehow imposing on other women. And I started to resolve not to do that. My new year’s resolution last year was to stop apologising for the way I feel, no matter what it is I feel. I did a remarkably good job of it, if I do say so myself, and it genuinely changed my life. Now what I’m working on is just allowing myself to feel however I feel, which is more difficult despite being more elementary.

Feelings are feelings, and we don’t have to act on them. Ironically, that was a point that was hammered home in Catholic school. But with all the shame attached to certain feelings, and my hyper-internalisation of SJ issues, and the imposition issue, do I really believe that deep in my soul? I’m not sure I do. Can I even acknowledge when I have sexual feelings, rather than trying to repress them because even though I’m not going to act on them, I don’t want to have them at all?

This morning at church, we read Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” aloud together. My fellow English majors will probably recognise it for its most famous line – “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine” – and that is a really beautiful line, but it was the first three lines that stood out to me today, as if I was meant to read them at this precise time:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

(Emphasis mine.)

I guess I haven’t really been doing that. A lot of queer women – and, for that matter, a lot of queer non-women, and a lot of cishet women – probably don’t, for lots of reasons.

I’m going to try.

I’m not sure what it means for my sexual identity, which is a little frustrating and a little scary. I’m so used to identifying as more ace than not. Now I’m not sure if that’s really true. But I know I have to be honest with myself and find out.

#dreams of an impossible princess #honestly this kind of has me more fucked up than i think this post lets on?#it's really hard to express it - any of it - in words but this is my best attempt

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