My friend Nicky posted a video about his own struggles with being on the aro/ace spectrum, and it reminded me that silence is the thing that kills us. So I thought I should say something.
It is easy to feel like a monster when you don't work the way everyone else does.
It took me a very long time to even understand myself as aromantic, much less to fully to internalize the normalcy of that. I do not experience romance, I do not have romantic attraction. And every time I have tried to think myself into love, or rationalize that whatever affection I feel for someone MUST be love because humans are SUPPOSED to love romantically, I have hurt other people and I have hurt myself.
I don't know how to describe what it feels like to care for someone who is in love with you, and to be unable to love them the way they love you. To see them pour themselves into you and to be closed off to them, no matter how much you want to be open. It's like living on the other side of plate glass. I can see the shape of love but I can't feel it.
I thought for a long time that I must be a sociopath or something. That I must have some kind of mental illness or a disorder that has killed my heart, and cut me off from whatever it means to be normal. I felt like a monster in human clothing, like the villain of some cheap 90s psychological thriller.
The thing that has saved me is community, to see that there are other people who feel the world the way I do. That I am not trapped in a glass box alone, but that I just live in another part of the human experience. One that has always been there, just with different names, and often not talked about.
I don't think of myself as broken anymore, but still... every time I see romance in art and media, love that transcends all boundaries, redemptive love, burning love, toxic love... I am at once grateful that art allows me to access those experiences in some small way... and I feel a longing. I feel the echoes of obsession in the back of my head that maybe one day I'll meet the right person and they'll fix me and then I get to know what it is to be normal.
I won't. There is no "normal," the human experience is complex and that should be okay. But I feel like Frankenstein's tragic sad monster all over again every time some probably well-meaning person tells me "aww that's sad." I will pay you any amount of money to be spared that "sympathy."
titsay
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