I thought it was a good idea at the time...

( My Aromantic Section )   

 I have had my first trip in an ambulance! I was in so much pain I only remember the paramedic had very defined eyebrows. I can also add myself to the great number of Australians who have experienced ramping.
It was a very educational trip to the Emergency Department because I found out the hard way that I have bad reactions to several strong pain killers. So not fun. 
I should be fine, I have a cornucopia of pills to help be achieve health again. Though my head still feels like a jelly dropped at the top of some stairs. 

My last post was private as I was just archiving my book lists, but now I feel I should share some of the things I was reading before.
( Let the linkspam commence! )

Recently I have gone through emotional changes and this past week I seem to keep finding the same topics popping up again and again, which I choose to take as a sign that I should try to work through some of my feelings. 

I grew up in an environment of conservative and progressive influences, I'm sure many people have but all in our own unique recipe of the two. Since the deaths in my family I have found I am more body confident than I had been in years. I am also feeling much more settled inside myself as a person. For the first time in forever I feel like my internal storm has truly abated and I can see the internal scene and all the accumulated debris. Which lead about the terrible realisation that much of the dissatisfaction was actually external input. Semi-regular flippant comments about hair and weight, dating and boys, physical ability and life goals, that I thought I had ignored actually cut me deeply. Now those thoughts which were not my own are now literally in the grave with the persons who made them.  

I am not a good self-critic. I can only analyse things in hindsight if I am prompted to do so. Basically much of the time I flail and hope I come across other people who give me ideas to make sense of my reactions and life. 

I have discovered I do in fact have quite a lot of internalised misogyny linked to a sense of inferiority related to my disability (Internalised Ableism Alert!). I don't even know if misogyny is really the right word, a more apt term might be Toxic Femininity. I push back against amatonormativity a lot. I feel that expectations of romantic love force themselves on me all the time, but might I be letting them in to torment me? My last post 'Females Love' talked about this. I have internal expectations of what women are, very traditional European ideals. If I write them out specifically I see how silly they are and can rebuke them but there is still this deep vague sense that they are correct. 

Being in Queer spaces has exposed me to many people of different genders and many different journeys those people have made to get there. I have no gender journey, do I? How am I female then? How do I know? up rises the 28 year old monster of memories of comments, expectations and traditions (this monster it seems has always been present lurking beneath the surface and informing my experiences, but it lets itself be seen every so often). I have no role models who are aromantic or disabled in the same way I am, let alone both. Truthfully I was never really interested finding any. One group I am intrinsicly connected to is my bloodline, so they sort of became my 'best fit' role models for certain things, and it certainly makes sense when it comes to health history. But what of the rest of history?

Half of my family migrated to Australia after WWII, and they kept almost nothing of their old home countries, very little sense of culture was passed down. So I, wanting some sort of anchor clasped whatever I could. Much of that is from a time almost unrecognisable, but I absorbed it and in many ways I thought it applicable to me. Deep inside I still think it is applicable to me, but that is just causing me pain, but is it worse to keep pushing against external factors I invite in or to remove all the internalised issues themselves?
Here is a list of some which I abstractly know are not true to my experience but they are specific to my sense of who my family is and in turn who I am. 
(TL;DR I've had this list of stuff subtly reinforced in me for 28 years, now I'm deciding to try to purge it. I'm so screwed) 

• Love can grow from passion
• Certainty-of-marriage-partner at first sight/Love at first sight is real
• a long-term relationship is the most significant relationship you will have outside of children (Sometimes not even children)
• a partner gives you better social status
• families arrange suitable suitors 
• family approval is of the upmost importance
• you must master the duties of a housewife
• sacrificing everything for love may improve your future
• Being submissive is better
• being slightly masochistic will serve you well because life/love is painful
• get married as a young virgin 

I have heard it said that generally people feel several attractions together. Their attractions are not separable as they flow organically from each other. Apressexuality in its basic definitions is only experiencing sexual attraction after another form of attraction is felt. So you feel some sort of attraction then sexual attraction shows up. Most people probably feel it that way so why do we have a word for something that can probably just be assumed in heteronormativity? Or any sort of normativity…

Not even the person who coined Apres- seems to have done so for sexual attraction, rather they coined it in terms of being Apresplatonic.


When I was questioning I was searching for a label or at least some indication that my experiences were not unique. I stumbled upon Aromantic and it explained so much! but there was a blank spot because ‘Aromantic’ does not cover the basic attraction that had brought me back searching LGBTQIA+ sites again, sexual attraction.

I probably would have been okay just identifying as Aromantic. And for the most part I do. In online spaces however where discussions get technical and nuanced within the a-spectrum communities I tend to use both the Aromantic and Apressexual labels.
The bottom line is I don’t like separating out my attractions. I don’t experience them as separate. They are all steps on the same path, and the path is paved with Aromantic stones. That said, I can identify them as different when they occur (using hindsight and lots of thinking comparisons) and isolate them to discreet incidents (because they aren’t constant, or even common).


When it happens:
I guess it comes close to those descriptions of love at first sight (which totally isn’t ‘love’ by the way). I see or hear the person for the first time and it is there. Generally sensual attraction, things to do with the senses; looking, touching, hearing or tasting (….let’s just ignore smelling).

I become hyper focused on them to the point where the rest of the world fades out. I get fixated on the part of them that attracts me. It is like an irresistible lure BUT there is no guarantee that sexual attraction will show up HOWEVER I have only ever felt sexual attraction to someone in the wake of these other feelings (while my Aromantic-ness goes into overdrive which makes me more sensitive to things I perceive as romantic) Though in the moment everything just feels like one big ‘more’.

It is a micro-label. A micro label that seems to consist of a population of ONE, me (drop me a line if you use Apressexual too! or if you are questioning it!). Having a label allows me to be vague about my experiences. Sure, I may have to explain the label or how I relate to it but I find that much more comfortable than continually typing out very personal experiences that may or may not help anyone anyway.

I found an accurate word so that is what I am going to use.
_{(until someone works out an easy way to blend romantic and sexual orientation language)}