“not deep romantic love”≠ “soul-sucking evil”

I keep seeing people who are– very justifiably and understandably– concerned about straight men taking advantage of women they have sex with, but who direct that concern and suspicion specifically at men who ID as aromantic, and like…

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I like that group of posts about intimidation, especially the one I linked to yesterday. I’m glad I wrote it.

It’s dark, it’s a very messed-up idea and I’m aware of that, but it accurately describes something that goes on in my head, and it’s good to have that down on paper. So I can recognize the usefulness of the “you can’t scare me because I don’t exist” thing, and also think through to the fact that actually I would like to exist, and existing involves being scared sometimes but there is still a possible goal of existing and not being scared.

Stuff that makes sense in retrospect

Or, what I thought about while cooking dinner today:

Of course I have opinions about the whole empathy=goodness/psychopath/sociopath thing.

Because guess what else can be boiled down to “If you don’t feel the right way about certain things, you are abnormal in a bad way, maybe even subhuman or evil”?

  • Homophobia, in some ways
  • Some more general kinds of societal pressure about sex and relationships
  • People’s reactions to sensory processing problems and sensitivities, sometimes

And being expected to change the way you FEEL about things– something you can’t change– is so awful. That simultaneous knowledge that I have to change something (and it should be so easy! Just do it! Just act normal!) and that I can’t, no matter how hard I try… that’s something that really haunts me. It’s the most painful part of a whole lot of shit for me.

And comparing/generalizing things like that is something my brain likes to do. So yeah.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the end of With the Lightnings because I still can’t get that simile about the hole out of my head.

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Sparkly and I talked about Christianity a while ago

Ey was raised Catholic, and I was raised in a succession of small Protestant churches which, as far as I can tell, my parents chose mainly for their smallness and lack of internal politics/drama. For most of the time span in which I was old enough to actually pay attention, we went to an American Baptist church. So Sparkly’s and my experiences are pretty much completely opposite.

The American Baptists barely have a hierarchy at all. There’s a huge emphasis on the autonomy of individual churches, and of individual members, to choose what they believe and how they practice. I remember hearing the phrase “soul freedom”, which meant an individual person’s autonomy to follow whatever they deeply believe, whether other members of their church, their pastor, regional or national organizations, etc. agree with them or not.

And at the time that didn’t seem super important to me? It was mentioned in passing, and the thing is I had nothing to really compare it to. I had no experience of being Told to believe things beyond the very vague and basic, and no experience of focused individual pressure to believe or profess anything at all.

So I have to keep reminding myself that that’s a pretty unusual experience of being raised Christian.

Brain + ears = ?

You’re probably familiar with the thing where you hear/see a word while speaking/writing/typing and accidentally say/write/type what you heard/saw instead of what you meant to say. (Like this.)

I hadn’t noticed it before but apparently I can do this without noticing the out-of-place word?

Specifics:

Today I was captioning something while Sparkly was watching TV. Somehow my brain transposed the word “duckies” (there were rubber ducks on the TV show) into the video-to-be-captioned that I was trying to pay attention to, and I typed it in the middle of my transcript, and for a good thirty seconds, I really thought that it had been part of the video. I didn’t realize what had happened until I noticed that the people on Sparkly’s TV show were still talking about ducks.

A while ago I was, again, half-listening to a TV show, and apparently I heard Sparkly say something about the TV show and thought someone in the show had said it.