Off the Board

  • Post last modified:Saturday, December 12th, 2020
  • Reading time:5 mins read

God, even on a relatively good day it’s all up and down with me, sometimes from minute to minute. When the tears start coming, I just curl up and start muttering over and over, “You’re not my best friend, you’re not my best friend.” I don’t even hear it until it’s been happening.

I don’t need that garbage. I’ve got myself now. I’m finally building the relationship that matters the most. But the pain, it never really goes away. I just sometimes manage to forget. For a while.

Anyway, I’m actually feeling emotions these days, so that’s something. They are what they are. They’re neutral. It makes sense that I would feel them. Better than I not. They don’t apply to my current reality. There is no danger attached to them. They’re just normal grief.

One has to grieve, and grief isn’t linear. Change doesn’t work like that, when you’re human. I broke my wrist when I was fourteen. Dumb bike accident. There’s no visible scar, but it still aches sometimes. Even when it doesn’t, it feels odd. Some alien sensation I still can’t name.

I don’t want an unkind person to make me bitter, make me lose trust and hope. They’re just them. They act this way to everyone. I had no reason to think I was exempt. It has nothing to do with me, or with anyone else. I was never responsible for a cruel person’s behavior.

You’re never responsible for another person’s behavior, no matter the relationship, no matter what they say to you.

I want to think most people are earnest. Dumb, self-centered, and oblivious to anything outside their experience, maybe. Misguided. But well-intentioned at least. There are predators, and I guess I am getting better at spotting them, but it can’t be that many.

I don’t subscribe to the reality they insist we live in. I can’t accept such a broken, wrong view of the world. The only monsters are the people who think everyone is a monster but them.

The thing is, both romance and sex-based attraction are fundamentally about reducing the other—and often one’s self—to a function. It’s this act of objectification, encouraged by the structure of the culture that we live in. It all confuses me, and strikes me as so upsetting. I don’t want someone to treat me like that, and I don’t want to objectify anyone else. I just want to appreciate and be appreciated by virtue of who one is as a person. Like. I don’t want to be a thing to anyone, and I can’t view others as things to me. It doesn’t really register.

There’s a distinction here. I can understand the role of sex as communication in an existing relationship. It’s not for me, but I get it. A physical language, based in consent and affection and mutual appreciation? Why not. (If one can tolerate it personally.) But sexual attraction as such? The viewing of another in terms of personal arousal? Basing one’s interest in another person on that premise? It’s a big yikes here. It heebs my jeebies right out of my bones.

It does well to stress that I don’t intend this as judgment; more as an attempt to clarify a cultural disjunct that causes me personal distress. There’s a boundary issue in all of this that I have real trouble navigating, and it has resulted in… problems, at times.

In the abstract I see sex as this hilarious folly. Like, what are you even doing, you silly dummies. Its appeal lies in its absurd bathos. There’s a sincere place for that kind of whimsy. I am unsure if the place I’d choose is where most people would expect.

For other people, there’s this transactional nature to certain things that I just… can’t resolve. It doesn’t work with my brain, and it scares me a little because I don’t easily see it except in hindsight.

That understanding of a transaction causes so many people feel Owed, and it, like—this is my body. This is my person. I’m not here for you. I can be with you, if you’re cool. We can do neat stuff together. No one owes anyone anything except recognition of their mutual humanity.

I just don’t get power dynamics. Other people can play these roles and navigate these rules and have fun doing it like it’s all a game, and fine. So long as they’re all consenting and respecting each other, so what. Go nuts. But, like. I can’t.

Yet there is this underlying unspoken presumption: of course I can. I must, and I will, and if I say I don’t, I’m lying or there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. Everyone’s playing the same game, people seem to think, and there’s no way to opt out. And, that can be fucking dangerous.

There are levels to this. There’s the… like, the reaction I’m starting to get from randos when I walk to the grocery store, right. The overt angle. More insidiously… I am getting better at spotting and understanding coercion, at a pace. Not so much when it’s in my face. Like. I don’t know how to clearly signal that I am not playing. You’re not getting anything from me. I don’t want anything from you. I’m just a person here. Can’t we be cool?

I’m just saying, living in a system where this is the norm causes me distress, and I can’t get with it. Don’t want to subscribe. It’s not a moral issue; more a philosophical one based on how my brain fucking works and how I navigate the world. And, like. There are consequences to that disconnect.

The dynamics of consent are complicated, and I expect I will be picking through my history for the rest of my life.