Thursday, May 16, 2019

Editorial note: published retroactively July 6, 2020, unedited but with clarifying additions inline.

Finding myself drifting into thought-territory that is mostly occupied by attraction and relationship matters. I don't really know what to make of any of it yet, but I sort of hope that leaving some breadcrumbs will help in some way.

Of course, I have the standard tangled confusion between finding people attractive and wanting to feel like I am that attractive. This is particularly pronounced around women. On one extreme, on total boy days, it's mostly attraction with a faint hint of wistful jealousy. But even on serious girl days, I still find women hot; there's simply an increase in the jealousy.

Sometimes in weird moments I may find a guy cute or even actually appealing. This is OK, really, because I'm already fine with identifying as bi and I guess it sort of makes sense to be interested in men in ways I'm not totally used to thinking about while my gender moves around. I'm trying really hard not to repress anything or whatever - I certainly don't want to discourage whatever is Actually Real. On the flip side, I'm hesitant to "force" anything either, and so when I do get attraction feelings for a man, it usually instantly trips a strange discomfort that I can't quite figure out, and I leave it alone and move on. Somehow I don't think this is quite the right approach but I have yet to really pinpoint anything better.

[Added in hindsight when publishing in July 2020: I'm not bi. Attraction is vastly more complex, and human connection has so many more possible configurations, than I understood when I wrote this. I still don't understand it.]

Beyond the starting point of attraction, I'm quite lost with regards to actual relationships. I feel like it would be disingenuous or even deceptive to try and start anything right now. I mean, maybe I could explain my entire stupid fucking spiel well enough, but... I don't want to do that right out of the gate, because it's a fucking exhausting conversation and nobody is really looking for it to begin with. And yet I feel like if I go far enough with someone to feel comfortable that they're ready for that talk and worth the energy it'd take to actually have it... it just seems like by that point it's too late and I'm back in disingenuous territory. So I don't know.

I feel like it would be nice to have a better relationship situation in general. Not just a sex/romance/life-partner/whatever-the-fuck arrangement but just... actual friends and shit. It would be nice to have shit to do. People who will check in and make sure shit's OK. Maybe even some vague allusion to the feeling that someone cares For Real, in that weirdly gross but romantic kind of way where you would totally brave the bodily fluids and the precarious rescue in shitty weather and the hellish conversation at the police station at 3AM and the life choices you might actually regret if the experience hadn't been so fucking unadulterated awesome.

It isn't worth lying, covering up, or weaseling around. I want to feel like people love me. I want to feel, when it comes time to look back over whatever the fuck my life amounts to, like I had some fucking traveling companions. Not the assorted allotment of unknown mystery stand-ins that populate the rest of the bus or plane - people who were in it for each other, who knew that no matter how wildly uncertain and uncontrollable the path ahead, we were all going to jump into that maelstrom together. The kind of people who will stand in a huddle in the dark, shrugging off the misty rain, to say some mystical incantation of bonding, in a ritual nobody can actually really define; the kind of people who will look back on that circle from the next morning's warm light, and still take that shit seriously, because we all give a fuck about it, and who fucking cares if it's a little cheesy or stilted. Fuck you, we're for real here.

God... I want to feel like someone would willingly choose to do something silly or awkward or outright fucking stupid, just to prove they love me. I want to feel like that's not even a decision, for someone - that who fucking cares what it costs, Amelia needs love and acceptance. And it doesn't matter who sees.

I worry that I've started rejecting socialization because it doesn't reach that level of intensity and earnestness very easily. I sort of feel like if I gave it time, and built on things, I could get somewhere. It's just such an immense amount of work and time... and it costs more spoons, on any given day, than I usually have laying around. The flip side is that I feel like I am trying to selectively invest those spoons into the handful of opportunities that are most likely to pay off.

I don't really know. All I can say for sure is that this shit is getting lonely and I'm becoming keenly aware of the danger of just buckling entirely and locking myself in a dark box for the next hundred years.

Jesus fucking Christ.

It all really is that goddamn simple.

I just want someone to love me.

I want to know that somebody is completely, unchangingly, stubbornly convinced that I deserve to be loved. Even if they never really do manage to convince me. I just want to know that they are that sure. Sure enough to shrug off any pain in the defense of that notion. Even the pain of knowing I might never agree.

I want someone to read the meandering, incoherent stream of self-indulgent horse shit that I'm accumulating here, and look for the mangled and hopelessly lost soul behind it all. I want them to see whatever wreckage and despair is left at the end and somehow perceive someone in the debris. I want them to breathe in relief when they finally catch sight of whoever is there - and I want them to say, "yes - I love her. She is worth it."