-TRIGGER WARNING!!- I'm going to talk about some things relevant to highly stigmatized and taboo topics, even in the 21st Century, because...well, of course they are. If #Adulting and discussing things related to adulting are something you're not comfortable dealing with, then you might want to skip this one.
Normal service will be restored at a later date.
There...now that that's out of the way...
Over the past few years, my interest in social media...and a few other things I'll get to presently...has dwindled down to pretty much nil.
In the early days of it I, like a whole lot of other people I knew, saw it as a new and exciting way to connect, reconnect and expand the boundaries of communication and relationship building, both platonically and otherwise. Unfortunately, such arenas were never meant to be kept as pristine as they were intended and so I've found little to no real use in being a part of the mob that went on to conquer and dictate how they're now constituted.
The first one to go was Twitter which, as a journalist, was once an excellent source of immediate information that was useful to my line of work. But those days are LONG gone and to be honest, I don't miss it all that much. But out of what I guess can only be described as a morbid sense of curiosity, I went back on it a few days ago to see if the landscape had changed from passive-aggressive cesspool to something a little more tolerable.
And one of the primary trending topics I noticed was one called #thisiswhatasexuallookslike...and that got my mental gears turning.
I've made no secret about my position regarding relationships, attraction, affection, love, sex, and how they apply to me. They no longer do and haven't for close to a decade now.
And seeing declarative statement after declarative statement from others who came to similar conclusions as I have, albeit for reasons far more diverse yet equally as credible as my own, I figured what the hell? Why not formally add my name into that crowd and not be ashamed of the thought?
So I did...and it took about five minutes for someone to take exception with my position, apparently from the somewhat dizzying height one might find astride a rather high horse.
"Asexuality isn't a choice or a lifestyle the way celibacy and abstinence are. I suggest you do more research into it before making incorrect conclusions."
Uh...yes...I know. And if the person who leapt to this incorrect conclusion had even a slight glimpse into how I came to my conclusion on this, I have a hunch they might not be so quick to judge.
In our current socio-cultural discourse, the knee-jerk reaction to any man saying they're not interested in either relationships or the intimacies that can grow out of relationships is to brand them with the universally damning definition, InCel, a.k.a., 'involuntary celibate.'
Since the term has come to prominence in the past 20 years, it should be noted that it wasn't a man or group of men who came up with the term in the first place. According to multiple independent sources that have reported on the exponential growth and hostilization of InCels in the last decade, a Canadian woman coined the term in 1997 as a way of trying to build an inclusive support community for people like her, who found trying to establish relationships difficult to near-impossible for a myriad of reasons.
Turns out that as the internet's dark corners grew darker, the term was hijacked by the uber-toxic underbelly we're currently are dealing with on both sides of the gender chasm, but I digress...
Throughout my formative years and well into adulthood, I knew there was something different about me in how I both perceived and processed all the emotions and impulses connected to love, affection and sexuality. All three of these aspects were profoundly impacted and to a fair degree, I will concede, warped, by experiences I would live through before I was even a teenager.
When your parents neglect you, a stepfather physically and emotionally abuses you, a trusted friend sexually abuses you and your sexuality in general is engaged when you're waaaay too young to fully process all that in anywhere near a reasonable, healthy fashion, it's impossible to know just how much that will impact not just your life, but your self-identity and how you interact with other people going forward.
Until I hit high school, I was so far off the diving board that it was scary for both myself and the friends I had at the time, and I don't say that lightly. It wasn't until I was close to graduating that my brain had evolved enough for me to start coming to terms with the conflict of the person I'd been and the person I wanted to be, but one thing had become quite clear.
Instead of being a hypersexual kid because of what I'd experienced so early in life, I had managed (in ways I'm still not entirely sure the how of) to somehow find myself on the asexual spectrum as an absolute demisexual.
That, to the uninitiated, is when a person is not capable of feeling attraction to anyone they do not have a strong emotional connection to. Translation: If I don't REALLY care about you, then I'm not interested. Full stop.
It was a weird position to find yourself in as a teenager, if I'm honest, because at a time where seemingly everybody around me was dealing with their respective sexuality suddenly kicking into gears including, but not limited to, overdrive, I was already at the point where I was just wanting to meet and be in a relationship with someone whom I felt comfortable enough that I could trust them.
Intimacy was a bridge to cross leagues down the road, which flies in the face of so-called conventional wisdom (a.k.a stigma), stating 'all men care about is sleeping with as many women as possible and damn consent or any conceivable consequences!' To be fair, there is without question, doubt or dispute, a definitive percentage of males who have an attitude somewhere in line with that. How big that share is, I have no idea and any estimates would be, at best, wildly inaccurate one way or the other.
Now, be that as I was in a monogamous relationship/marriage for 16 years and my son was the final byproduct of that, I trust you can put two and two together without me having to elaborate further about my sex life other than yes, it did exist once. That said, it wasn't long before he was born that I was becoming more and more aware that my interest in intimacy was rapidly disappearing. Sadly, my ex took this as an indication that I had been unfaithful, which was patently incorrect, but my attempts to explain what was happening fell on disinterested ears.
Even before I had my breakdown in 2011, it was impossible for me to not recognize the toll that both the stress and pressure I was under to be contributing as much as possible to that relationship physically, emotionally and financially, while also going to school to try and get my life going in a forward direction again, at the height of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, as well as my own Depression gaining strength and momentum, was taking. That strength and momentum was built upon all the horrible parts of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood that I'd managed to compartmentalize...but I'd never dealt with them in a healthy, productive manner.
And therein lies the second part of how I've gotten to this version of me at this point in time: The impact of trauma.
Like the mythical hydra, trauma is a many-headed beast and it's brutal. In the grand scheme of things, it can be argued that in comparison to other people I know, I got off relatively light in my encounters with it. However, such a conclusion also greatly discounts, marginalizes and trivializes the amount I've had, which is both unfair and in no uncertain terms...bullshit.
Trauma is not something that can be quantified via the measuring stick and there also can be no doubt that whatever degree of it I've experienced has left its mark on many aspects of who I am. Most obvious to this discourse being that in better part of the last decade, my place on the sexuality spectrum has shifted from demisexual to asexual.
The factors for that speak for themselves. A brutal divorce followed by an extreme roller coaster of an attempt at a new relationship that ended up seeing me villainized, demonized and ultimately being banished and then Ghosted after the prospect of even a platonic reconciliation had been established six years later.
Editorial Note: In the interest of both transparency and fairness to Ghost I'm not — in any way, shape or form — suggesting that I was somehow a victim in that. I screwed up a lot in that attempt, thanks in no small part to being unable to adequately cope with my Depression and anxiety, that were running rampant in my headspace at the time. I have always and will always own up to that, but that doesn't excuse her side of it either. Not by a long shot.
As much as we like to tell ourselves that being rejected isn't traumatic because all of us have the unalienable right to reject people we don't want, that is both a short-sided and even borderline sociopathic way of looking at the situation. And look, I get it. There's no easy or painless way to reject someone's interest or affection.
I've known that since I was barely ten years-old and it's been a constant in my life ever since.
Being told you're not good enough for someone hurts like few things a person can experience, regardless of gender. And when that comes from someone you really care about, it can be psychologically, emotionally and even physically crippling to the point where, depending on the degree of trauma inflicted...the damage can be both life-altering and permanent.
You may not like that, but I don't make the rules here, so you're gonna have to go well above my paygrade to file a complaint.
Now, before I go any further, I already know the response to what I just stated so let me put it out there. So what you're saying is we can't say 'No' to someone who's interested, because we're somehow obligated to return the favor, even if we don't want to?
And let me be as monumentally clear as possible with my response:
NO. You don't 'owe' anyone ANYTHING.
Not physically. Not emotionally.
It is within your right as a human being to have complete autonomy over the relationships you have or want to have. Just because a person is interested in you doesn't make them 'entitled' to that interest (or anything else for that matter) being returned if they haven't earned the privilege to your satisfaction.
That said, what we forget in this is the Newtonian law of an action generating an opposing reaction. Which, in this equation means when you break someone's heart like that, the severity of the action can often generate a just as, if not more, severe reaction because emotion and logic cannot coexist in a traumatic situation or in a traumatized mind. And if that person does not have the means by which to process that trauma in a healthy way then more often than not...that's when bad things happen.
For me, I can't necessarily say I processed mine in an entirely healthy way, but I know it could've been a hell of a lot worse. I left Portland to get away from everything that reminded me of those traumas. First to the geographic middle of nowhere for two years, then to the other side of the continent, then to the Midwest and now I'm back in New England again — 3,241 miles — from all the things I'm trying to move on from.
To be honest, some days it doesn't feel like it's far enough, but then I could be on the dark side of the Moon and it wouldn't feel far enough sometimes.
I don't get asked as much as I used to about when I'm going to meet someone and start dating again and I appreciate that. After being by myself for the last eight years, there's been many a time where I've felt that initial twinge of attraction for someone, but then one of two things happen.
I find out they're already in a relationship of their own, or the same ol' verdict of not being good enough is rendered.
So now, as I move through my early 40s, I look back on it all and realize that it's probably best that I've shifted this way and just don't want it anymore. After more than thirty years of wading through my own latent toxicity and trying not to drown in other people's, there is something liberating in not having a mind solely fixed on filling that void.
That doesn't mean it's not still there, as I suspect it always will be. If anything, I've been able to learn how to work around it, so I don't run the risk of falling into it again, landing right on my ass, and then figuring out how the hell I'm going to get myself out.
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