If The Types Came With An Instruction Manual: INFP Edition

honestly even the highest concept sci-fi seems tame once you learn BioSteel™ Goats exist irl

Y'know, whenever people want to talk about why aspec people 'count' as an oppressed identity, they tend to go for the big stuff like corrective rape and conversion therapy. And like, we should absolutely talk about that stuff. Obviously those things are terrible and important and we need to raise awareness and deal with them.

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.

No matter what anybody tells you, we have the right to demand more from life than this.

Hallo, Aro

Is it “aay-romantic” or “arrow-mantic”? What if she hears “I’m a romantic” instead of “I’m aromantic”? What if she says “isn’t that just friend…

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

I’ve now got twelve allo-aro short fiction and creative non-fiction pieces in this collection!

Folks can download PDF, EPUB and MOBI files for free from my Patreon, read individual stories on my WordPress site or view them all here on Tumblr:

Unspoken

Leaving

Friendship

Lucky

Attraction

Existence

Neuronormative

Loveless

Monstrous

Pressure, Side One

Pressure, Side Two

Abrasive

No story is longer than a thousand words. Please expect sex references in various degrees of explicitness and sundry depictions of amatonormativity.

Georgie's reaction to Ben Barnes' birthday is everything to me

October is ADHD awareness month! 🎉

The memory issues ADHD causes are some of the scarier and more frustrating parts of living with it - so here’s a set of reaction doodles that all my fellow ADHD peeps are welcome to use whenever anybody decides to comment on your forgetfulness ^ 

executive dysfunction be like *wants to do something* *doesnt do it* *feels bad* *wants to do something* *doesnt do it* *feels bad* *wants to do something* *doesnt do it* *feels ba

TV show writer: I have made a romance.

Me: You fucked up a perfectly good friendship is what you did. Look at it. It's got amatonormativity.

since i never see any positivity for aros like me, here’s a post for the ones with low empathy:

shoutout to the aromantic people with low empathy, the ones with antisocial or narcissistic personalities, the autistic aromantic people, the ones that everyone vehemently tries to erase to make aromanticism seem more “okay” to alloromantic people. it’s perfectly fine to not feel connected to people in general and to identify as aro due to this. you’re still valid. it’s okay to not relate to humanity to the point where you can’t possibly picture yourself falling in love. it’s okay to only experience platonic feelings for people because you don’t want to bother with having to consider another person’s feelings in the way romance requires. shoutout to the aros that actually are somewhat “heartless” and don’t care about others, the psychopathic aros, the sociopathic aros, the narcissistic aros.

i feel like the aro community as a whole spends so much time on positivity and making sure people understand that most aromantic people can love people platonically or do experience deep meaningful connections with people that they forget that, for some of us, our inability to relate to people and indifference to others does not make us any less aro.

"friendzoning"? i think we should talk about romancezoning. as someone who's aro, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable if someone says they're romantically interested in me. i guess it could be a little flattering at first, but the idea of, like, my close friends secretly wanting a romantic relationship instead is. not a pleasant thought.