I Love You
Love truly is a miracle. For all my life, I know I have felt a lot of love for the people that have been close to me and important to me, and I know that some of them have truly loved me too, still do to this day, or have once loved me but no longer do. The funny thing about love, though, is that there are many different kinds, many different flavors of love out there, but we don't talk about all of them as much as we should. Maybe that's how you get confused oblivious idiots like myself, someone who does not see that they way they feel about the gender society tells them to be attracted is love, yes, but it's a different kind of love. Someone whose entire family have all known that their child is gay, while they are none the wiser. Someone who gets jealous of a dear friend of theirs when they tell them they have a partner of some kind, even though the two have never met in person.
You Don’t Have To Be Ashamed
It's taken a very long time for me to be comfortable with the act of sexual intimacy. I'm on the asexual spectrum, and sex has never been at the forefront of what I value the most in a relationship. It has never been a dealbreaker for me in any way, and lack of sex to me does not signify a failing relationship. But not all of that disregard is rooted in me being ace. A small part of it is due to learned – or taught to be more precise – patterns of thinking.
Girls?!
When I was eleven years old, I got my very first professional sketchbook. It was marketed to be specifically for artists that were looking for that authentic manga feel to their art – it even had a silly image of some anime boy on the cover. I was so excited to start drawing like a professional, to have a legit sketchbook with legit manga lineart pens, just for drawing all those pretty anime girls.
Supporting
Sometimes, they let you have visitors. If you're relatively stable, not a threat to others and can handle social situations, you are allowed to invite people to come see you at the ward. Typically, it's family members that visit the patients, but close friends are also common. For me, having people visit me is the most important part of recovering and getting closer to the eventual check-out date along with the actual treatment. In general, it feels good to leave the sterile white rooms for a little while and talk with people who are living their regular lives. It makes you feel like a normal person again, kind of restoring that connection to the outside world you've lost since being admitted.
Don't Worry, This Is A Loving Punch
Violence is never an act of love. It's a myth that we have been force-fed, especially women and female-presenting people. That the reason that boy is being mean to you is that he just likes you. We've been conditioned to expect violent behavior out of the people closest to us. Almost everyone has some type of experience this with this, I'm pretty sure.
Life Update: Fall-ing In Love
The older I'm getting, the more I find myself liking autumn. This makes it sound like I'm actually old, when I'm literally in my early twenties, but you get the point. When I was a teenager, I used to despise this season. I guess it reminded me of the school year starting too much, so the entire period of autumn got a bad name. But as I am growing and finding what it's like to have your own life as an adult, fall is becoming a time I'm more excited to experience year after year.
Life Update: Looking For A Bro
I think men are amazing. Some of the most important people in my life have been men, and only a few of my abusers have been male. It has usually been other girls and women who have hurt me the most, which is why I have this general feeling of fear and distrust around them. In my eyes, men are more trustworthy than women, so I've naturally gravitated towards them.
The Aching In My Muscles
For quite some time now, I have suspected that all of my physical symptoms might be caused by fibromyalgia. A lot of trauma survivors develop this chronic pain disorder, including one of my biggest idols, Lady Gaga. I became aware of the condition through her, actually. When I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I was hit with a wave of realization: an artist I really look up to has that condition too. Gaga has talked about her mental health struggles a lot more openly in the recent years, and the more I hear her talk about what it is like to live with fibromyalgia and other constant post-traumatic symptoms, the more I find myself relating to her. She is, truly, one of my biggest inspirations; a supporting force whose art has helped me get through a lot of rough spots during the years.