Ah, Wikipedia <3

tchtchtchtchtch replied to your post: tchtchtchtchtch replied to your post “followers...

My most favorite thing is language contact - borrowing, codeswitching, pidgins & creoles. My thesis in undergrad was about my sibling’s friend group’s particular mix of English and Russian. I also used to work on speech recognition & synthesis which was kinda phonetics/phonology-ish. I’m definitely not an expert on any of these topics though

that all sounds fuckin awesome!!! 

under the cut please find a rambling wordvomit about my issues with regards to asexuality and personal identity. presented exactly as I wrote it with no editing for coherency, basically I just need to write my thought processes sometimes. 

like it if you read it pls?

So I’ve been at church all day, working for/attending a women’s retreat, and it’s got me thinking about a lot of things re: religion, feminism, and my personal life; but the thing that I need to talk (write) out and process is code switching.

It’s generally accepted that you behave differently in different environments (school, work, home, church, etc) based on the people around you and what they expect of you. It’s only when your actions are wildly different or contradictory that it’s an issue.

For some background on my church: it is fairly small, a congregation of a hundred or so, generally very elderly. Our denomination is very progressive though, and we have multiple openly LGBT+ members, have women elders and allow women to teach, and are very passionately ‘green’. I have gone there since the age of 5, and have been a confirmed member since age 12. So of the ladies that were there today, they have either known me since forever, or I am technically more established in the church than they are.

Now, how this relates to code switching: the person I am at church is a fantastic person, basically who I would be if I fit into a lot more of society’s molds, and also absolutely not me. For the most part, the things that are unique about church-me are absolutely good traits (and also things modeled after my mom’s church persona): extreme patience and kindness, more outgoing and I find talking to new people easier, better work ethic and helpfulness to others.

But part of the outgoingness is very very fake. I will say things that I don’t believe, or things that are not true about myself. This is always done in the interest of not rocking the boat, or not causing any controversy or further discussion. Usually done re: mental illness, politics, feminism, and chiefly today my (lack of) heterosexuality. So many of these ladies are utterly invested in me getting married, soon, and I had at least three conversations where I expressed interest in meeting/dating men, which I pretty much do not want to do.

As I’m typing this now, I’m starting to think that this has more to do with being closeted than codeswitching perse. Since this is really the only ‘problematic,’ non-me, part of church-me, and the rest of that person are magnified positive attributes, imma go ahead and change the thesis of this word-vomit to being about closeted aceness. Cool.

So, why is this different from my closeted ace-ness at home? There its just a nonissue. Neither my little sis or I have ever dated much (excepting my one high school boyfriend) and there was never an expectation from the parents that we should be. Sometimes there are jokes or flippant comments about a future husband, but saying that I don’t plan on ever getting married is basically accepted with a “well, I’m sure you’ll change your mind about that” but no pressure to do so.

Since I’m not working at the moment, home, church, and the internet are my only social spaces. On the internet, I am of course openly ace, and this is accepted and people are much less likely to be casually heteronormative.

But then there’s church. In the south. And in this instance, an all-female setting (look we’re just not even gonna touch my gender issues today bc I’m tired). At least two ladies would like to introduce me to their grandson. One of the younger old ladies (~50) wants to go out with me to scope guys at the next town event. And I agreed to all of those things, due to the friendly agreeableness that church brings out in me. I rarely say no to things church people ask me to do, within reason, and due to not wanting to explain asexuality/come out as such, that led to me acting hetero, and feeling bad about said actions not being true to myself