I ghosted my first therapist because she told me that if I never found a sexual/romantic parter I would always have a void of loneliness within me.
Yeah, I know. Pretty crazy thing to say to a person, right?
When I originally reached out to her that summer to start counseling, I cited my reason as a bout of summer depression. By the time we actually started talking that fall, we determined that a lot of my issues stemmed from pent-up grief, and later that grief morphed into self-loathing and isolation and loneliness. During this our last session, I walked in feeling like I had no one to talk to, and she took that to mean that I should pursue dating.
This all happened during the fall of my twenty-fourth year, two years after the death of my grandmother and a few months before the pandemic started. I had been out to myself and the internet and the people I loved for about three years, not knowing then that I was more than just asexual, I was also aromantic.
When I started looking for a therapist in the height my summer depression, I made sure to find someone who was supportive of queer identities. Even though I felt like I had worked through all my sexuality spirals (almost, but not quite), I knew I needed someone who supported my identity and understood how my sexuality intersected with all areas of my life. Of course, since this was my first therapist and I was still figuring out who I was and how to advocate for myself, I actively avoided telling her my sexuality. I wasn’t afraid of her per say…but I wasn’t not concerned about how she’d react.
Clearly, that anxiety was there for good reason.
After I spent part of our session talking about how alone I felt, how a lot of my friends were located all over the country, how I missed my best friend, this therapist started asking about my dating habits. I’m not sure if I recounted the one and only horrible date I went on earlier that year, but regardless, I informed her that I was not interested in dating thank you very much. Still, she persisted.
For some reason, if you do not disclose you’re asexual but you tell people you just don’t want to date, they will badger you relentlessly about the why and the how, and they insist that you’ll change your mind eventually. Sometimes even if you do explain your asexuality, people will not accept your celibacy. It’s so abnormal in our society to want to be alone that it makes people uncomfortable, and they don’t know what to do with you. My therapist at the time was no different.
Eventually, by the time she finally made her stance clear, going on about that void that I’d never escape, I felt horribly violated. The more we talked, the more I understood that I could never ever reveal my asexuality to her. Maybe she would have been more understanding if I told her I was ace, but there was also a good chance that she wouldn’t be supportive of my identity. I mean, she already made a point to tell me that I would be lonely forever, so why would it matter who I was or wasn’t attracted to? At that point in our session, I just decided I would let her say her piece, but I needed to get out of there as soon as possible.
At first when I got out of the session, I thought I was overreacting. I started gaslighting myself, thinking maybe I misheard her or maybe she meant something different. I texted a bunch of different people, trying to convince myself that I was wrong and she was fine and I should just move on from the whole thing. Luckily, my friends saw right through it. Everyone was incredibly offended on my behalf, telling me I needed to drop her as soon as possible, and as I sat there in my car feeling like I just got hit by a bus, I realized that I wasn’t as alone as I believed an hour ago.
Before we go any further, I want to make it very clear that what that therapist said is never acceptable to say to anybody, let alone an asexual person. Not only is it completely incorrect, but it’s also harmful and acephobic. You do not need sex or romance to live a happy life. There is no void within you if you do not want or need these things. And while a lot of people argue that humans are made for community and connection, it’s important to note that some people truly are better and happier on their own. And none of this is wrong or unhealthy or something to be ashamed of. Some people are just made differently and that’s okay.
Every day I am thankful that I saw that therapist at twenty-four instead of seventeen because if somebody had said that to me when I was a teenager, it would have devastated me. Luckily, I knew more about the world at that age than when I was fourteen, and I was confident enough in my identity as an asexual person that I was not swayed by this person’s blatant acephobia. But I sometimes wonder how many people that therapist has harmed by saying shit like that, and it makes me sad and angry.
Growing up, one of my biggest fears was that I would never get married. It kept me up in the middle of the night, bothered me during classes, clung to me at recess. What if I was so abhorrent, so freakish that nobody would ever dare commit to loving me for the rest of my life? I used to see singleness as a failure, and I used that failure to beat my self-esteem deeper and deeper into the ground. Surely if I got rid of all my acne and I lost weight and I wore make-up and I changed my entire personality, then I would be loved. Then I would stop being single. Then I would have someone to take care of me forever. This is the background noise that circulates through the heads of many young girls, and I was not immune.
And while a lot of my anxiety was rooted in the fear that I was the problem, that I was not good enough or pretty enough to be loved, I also worried that I would never have the joy that other people find in their partnerships. I was raised on Disney movies and I grew up in a home with a very happy marriage, so everything I knew about romance was beautiful and alluring. The world promised me that I would be loved, and I expected it to keep that covenant.
In time, when I entered puberty and we started studying sex in health class and my friends started lusting after any boy that walked, things got complicated. I definitely still was compelled by romance - I mean, I read Twilight for heaven’s sake - but the more my friends talked about it, the less I understood it. The paradox of my sexuality crept up like a weed and I couldn’t wrap my head around all the contradictions. I wanted to get married, but I did not want to have sex. I wished I had a boyfriend, but I did not want to go on a date. I daydreamed about dating, but I couldn’t imagine dating a single guy in our school.
The more I talked to my friends, the more confused I became about everything. It became clear to me very early on that I was not like other girls. They’d spend whole lunch hours talking about how “hot” certain celebrities were or dissecting which boys they wanted to kiss in our class, and every time they’d ask for my opinion, I couldn’t give a satisfying answer. If I told them I didn’t have any crushes, they’d tease me, convinced I was hiding some dark secret from them. If I told them I didn’t find anybody “hot” because I didn’t know what really meant, they’d call me a lesbian. They’d start saying certain phrases, telling certain jokes, and when I didn’t understand or refused to ask what anything meant, they would call me innocent or naive or pure. We danced around my asexuality like it was land mine, and I prayed that nobody would notice. I prayed hard enough that for a long time, I didn’t even notice myself.
As time wore on, I felt worse and worse about my romantic prospects. Sure, I was only fourteen, but shouldn’t somebody have asked me out by now? Was I doing something wrong by going home after school and staying in my bedroom all night like a child? I didn’t know what everyone else was doing differently. I couldn’t understand why my singleness was so stark compared to my friends. I didn’t necessarily want a boyfriend per say, but I wanted someone to love me. I wanted someone to commit to me. I wanted to be Seen. And it never occurred to me that my inability to find a boy to crush on was part of a bigger problem. Or rather, the solution I didn’t know I was seeking.
Realizing I was on the ace spectrum did not “cure” me of my fear of singleness. It didn’t feel like a “get out of jail free” card when I understood that I wasn’t attracted to anyone. I didn’t feel better about being partnerless when I came to the conclusion that sex repulses me. In some ways, all of this just made everything worse.
In the early stages of my sexual awakening (or I guess, my lack thereof), I found some comfort knowing I wasn’t weird for not wanting to have sex. When I first learned about demisexuality and asexuality at sixteen, it made me feel less alone to know that other people weren’t interested in it either. That yes, all my friends were horny as hell, but there were plenty of people out in the world who were not. It felt like an opportunity for me to find someone who was just like me. I thought that I could finally fall in love, if I only found someone who would support my identity, who maybe had the same identity, who didn’t mind if we were celibate. I naively believed that I was demisexual, that if I found the right person or put in enough time emotionally, I would one day be attracted to someone, that I would one day be interested in sex.
While demisexuality is a very valid identity and it is the experience of certain people, it is not my experience nor my identity. By telling myself I was demisexual, I was clinging to one last piece of hope, that there was still a chance for me to be “normal.” I assumed like so many that I was a late bloomer, the only exception, some special straight person who just had to wait for the right person to make her whole. (Which is, frankly, heteronormative patriarchal bullshit and has nothing to do with demisexuality.) For as much as asexuality freed me from believing I was abnormal, it sucked me into a deeper hole as I continued to try to conform to the expectations and lifestyle of an allosexual society.
By the time I entered college, I knew I was asexual. I was still working through demisexuality, very slowly coming to terms with the fact that there was not an exception to the rule and that I was actually not sexually attracted to anybody at all. I started befriending more queer people, watching my friends come out one after the other as hugely bisexual (seriously, what is it about asexual and bisexual people finding each other?), and over time I started to expand my worldview little by little. For a long time I told myself that I had to learn more about queer culture because I wanted to better support the people I loved. I had amassed a lot of queer friends of all sorts of identities, and I wanted to be a good ally.
Isn’t that always how it starts…
As a child of the 2000s, born to a conservative Christian family in a conservative state during a time when the entire school would ostracize you for coming out as gay, I did not know a lot about queer culture. In truth, it terrified me. I grappled with a lot of internalized homophobia, and queer people were so unapologetically different that it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t hate them or wish them ill, but I definitely didn’t understand them, and it bothered me that they did not conform to the norms I expected from society.
But I watched Glee. I listened to Lady GaGa. I got on Tumblr and saw fanfiction and gay ships and all sorts of queer people talking about their experiences. Queerness started to grow within me, a seed that was only then starting to sprout, and even though I still didn’t quite understand it, I couldn’t ignore it for much longer. However, beyond the stereotypes of Hollywood, I didn’t know much about queerness. I did not see myself as apart of this label or community, if only because I was still under the impression that I would marry a man one day. A lot of people excluded ace people from the community on principle, because they weren’t victims of harassment or oppression in the same ways that homosexual people were. I did not want to take up space where I shouldn’t, terrified that I would unintentionally harm someone in a community that I was still learning so much about. But as much as I explored the concept of being a lesbian or bisexual woman, those labels never fit me. I assumed I could never be queer. I didn’t think I wanted to be.
And so, even as I learned more about what it meant to be LGBTQIA+, I excluded myself from the narrative. I clung to my straightness more than ever before, and I continued to convince myself that I would one day find a partner. As frustrated as I was that I hadn’t found anyone, that I’d never been asked on a date, I firmly believed that my new “diagnosis” as ace would give me the freedom to find someone who was perfect for me. I figured that I just needed some time to get comfortable being a person. I needed to explore the world, travel some more, meet new people, expand my horizons. If I tried harder, if I stopped hating myself, if I put on a different shade of lipstick, maybe this time someone would ask me out.
As a teenager when I was starting to learn about queerness, and even in my early twenties when I started to spend more time engaging with the queer community, I had a very narrow view of what it meant to be queer. And it wasn’t just me. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a huge shift in queer rights and how queerness is perceived and accepted in the media. (We still have a long way to go, but I did witness the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, so that’s something.) I may have grown up watching Kurt and Blaine kissing on TV when I was in high school, but at that same time, my school shunned two girls who came out and started dating each other. Nobody around me spoke openly about what it meant to be gay, and if they did, it was to talk about how it was a sin. By the time “queer” started being widely reclaimed, I just assumed it was a synonym for “gay.”
Ultimately, once we dig past all the layers of internalized homophobia, I think the biggest reason I could not identify as queer was because I didn’t understand it. It’s so easy to put queerness in a box, to limit it to its most basic definition, to believe that to be queer is merely to be homosexual. And while that isn’t untrue, it’s not the whole truth.
The thing about queerness is that it’s more than just a sexual orientation. So often society will suggest that “queer” is a simple as “being homosexual,” to equate queerness with non-straight sex, to believe that being queer simply is the opposite of being heterosexual. But the truth is, queerness is bigger than any of the limitations that society puts upon it. In an effort to make allocishet people understand and empathize with what it is to be queer, we have sanitized and simplified and sexualized queerness into something that’s not exactly incorrect, but it doesn’t feel entirely accurate. It’s like trying to explain colors to a dog who only sees black and white. We can do our best to describe the rainbow, but if they only see shades of gray they will never fully understand life in color. Even if we keep shrinking our definition of queer, diminishing it to its most basic concept, allocishet people will still never see colors quite like we do.
Of course, as someone who thought she was allocishet and was raised by allocishet people, I did not have the context for any of this. I still thought I was seeing black and white, and by my meager definition, I was not allowed to see color. The reason I could not see myself as queer is because in truth, I could not picture myself having sex with a woman. (I couldn’t picture myself having sex with a man either…) Case closed, not queer, forever destined to be a boring straight person. I failed to see a deeper meaning of queerness, a murkier spectrum that encompassed an umbrella of identities and concepts. I also failed to recognize at that time that I still had a lot to learn about myself and the world at large.
I didn’t come to understand that I’m aromantic until I was twenty-five, in the first spring of the pandemic. In the heart of isolation, back when I stayed up until 2am making playlists in my bedroom every night, I read an Alice Oseman book that changed my life. The short and sweet of it is that after spending two decades clinging to the promise of a heteronormative marriage, this book showed me that I can find everything I wanted from marriage in my friendships. That may seem like a simple idea, especially since it’s something I’m so vocal about now, but at that time it was revolutionary and new.
Here is how I came to terms with being queer: I discovered that queerness is not contingent on being a sexual creature. For some people, that is how their queerness manifests. And ultimately in many ways, queerness explores the sexual parts of our identity. Queerness is how we are (or are not) attracted to people, how we interact with others, who we choose to share ourselves with. For a lot of people, that means who they want to have sex with, who they want to wed or partner with for the rest of their life, who they feel romantic attraction towards. But the big fat truth that society continues to disregard is that many people feel attraction in unconventional ways, to the extent that some people do not feel any attraction to any person of any gender in any way shape or form. How can these people be part of the norm when they are so misunderstood and forgotten by the allocishet world? How can these people not be queer if they do not conform to the expectations of an allocishet world? How has our society spent so long centering itself on sex and romance, to the point that not wanting those things is somehow even more absurd to the norm than having sex with the same sex?
I have been told more than once that asexual people - especially those with heteroromantic tendencies - cannot be apart of the queer community because they are not oppressed or bullied or marginalized. True, ace people have not been harmed in the way that gay people have. There’s a long and bloody history there that cannot be denied, and it’s important to keep that distinction. But two things can be true. Two minorities can be oppressed in different ways. One suffering does not negate or outweigh the other, they are merely different. Which is to say, fuck you if you think asexual people are not oppressed. If marginalization is the key to whether or not someone is queer, then asexuals deserve to be here too. We are not catered to. We are often forgotten or ignored. People do not believe we exist, or if they do, they think they can “fix” us. They tell us that we are robots, that we have a void inside of us that will never be filled. Nobody makes movies about us. If they put us in a TV show, we’re shown as unfeeling hyperboles, psychopaths and serial killers and villains. Nobody can stop us from getting married, but they can stop us from getting governmental benefits for staying single. They can enforce the idea that the only people who should be allowed to visit you in a medical emergency is your spouse or your next of kin. They can make marriage one of, if not the most important institutions in the western world.
I’m not here to argue which part of the queer umbrella has suffered the most. I’m honestly not even arguing that asexual people have been the most harmed or traumatized of all the sexualities. That is not the point. In truth, I am trying to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to believe that asexual people - regardless of their romantic tendencies, their interest in sex, or their individual attractions - are expected to be lumped in with the norms of an allocishet world. How is it not queer to not want sex? How is it not queer to be more interested in friendship than in a romantic partnership? How is it not unbelievably fucking queer that in a world dominated by marriage and romance and sex, we do not want or need or understand that in the same way allosexual/alloromantic people do?
What caused me so much distress in the course of my coming out journey is that I really desperately wanted to want an allonormative lifestyle. I love the idea of romance, of marriage, of falling in love, so why couldn’t I just let it happen for myself? I wanted to be the norm so badly that I was willing to put myself in uncomfortable situations in the hopes that I would change my mind. I forced myself to go on dating apps, to listen to my friends talk about their sex lives, to consume all kinds of media that could maybe teach me how to be an allosexual being. And then, when I couldn’t be the heteronormative woman that was promised, I tried to conform to the stereotypical queerness that was being broadcasted to my TV. If I had to be a sexual being, then surely it would be better to have a relationship with a safe, pretty woman than to be forced into close proximity with a scary man. So I tried reading sapphic romance novels and watching movies like Booksmart to see if I just didn’t understand what being gay felt like. I pushed myself to learn more and more about sex and queer culture and straight people, as if by having all the information in front of me I could finally connect the dots and understand exactly what I was missing. I was born this way, but maybe I just had to work harder than everybody else.
And then I read Loveless.
For someone who loves to be alone, I am so fucking terrified of being on my own. The reason I needed the promise of marriage was because it was the only way to guarantee that after everything, I wouldn’t end up by myself. Romance sounded thrilling, sure, and I definitely pinned a lot of my worth growing up on men finding me attractive, but at the heart of the issue was my fear of being lonely. Not because I cannot be by myself - I’m my own best friend always and I love myself a lot - but because the world is a scary place that is better faced and enjoyed with other people. And more than that, the world has conditioned all of us to believe that the only people we can rely on are the people bound to us in blood or ink.
Loveless is not a perfect book, and I recognize that it does not showcase the experience of every single aroace person. It made me feel seen in many ways, and I related a lot to the main character. But the real reason it had me weeping on my closet floor at 1am during isolation was because it taught me the boundless potential of queer friendship.
Over the course of my nearly three decades on this earth, I have been blessed with too many friendships to count. I was never in with the “popular” crowd, but I always had a lot of friends. My longest friendship started on the day I was born, and continues to this day. I still keep in touch with people from high school and college and a three-year period of post-grad where I hung out with a bunch of people from the internet at conventions. I have friends of all kinds in numerous states and countries, and I am the common thread between dozens of people all over the world. And while I’ve always loved my friends fiercely, to the point that I’ve cared about them a little too much, I never let myself believe that they could be more important than a romantic partnership.
It’s not really my fault. Unfortunately, our sex-obsessed society puts a huge emphasis on marriage and dating (for capitalism mostly), so we are raised to believe that the best thing we can aspire to is SPOUSE. We’ve created a culture where marriage is the endgame, that once you get married you’ll feel compelled to distance yourself from your single friends because you need to hang out with other married people who understand you, and then you’ll get pregnant and look for other married pregnant people and then suddenly your life is too busy for your single friends because you have to take care of a baby. Even if your friend starts dating someone it’s assumed that your friendship will take a back seat because the partnership is the most important relationship in the world.
But queer friendships are different. Partly this is because queer people build different relationships than allocishet people, but mostly I think it’s because queer people rely on community in different ways than straight people. The reason queer people have survived so long is because we need friends and allies and partners and families and communities to have our needs met. Our priorities and needs and desires aren’t the same as straight people, and neither are our relationships.
I wrote a whole post on this so I won’t detour too much (oops), but the only thing to cure my inherited desire for marriage was to completely reframe my perspective on queerness, on friendship, and on partnership. Specifically in a way that celebrates and amplifies my aroasexuality.
I spent so long terrified that I wouldn’t get married that I didn’t even stop to realize that marriage is not what I need or want. It never occurred to me that I can still get support and love and joy and magic from other places. I can be loved desperately by my friends and held up by my family and supported by my co-workers and enchanted by the strangers I pass in the grocery store. I can live alone in peace but call on my friend to bring me soup or get me a COVID test when I’m sick. I can video chat with my best friends who live across the country and plan vacations on the weekend and ask my best friend to drive me to the airport. I can get everything I ever wanted out of a marriage without twisting my stomach into knots and hating myself, and I can do it with dozens of people around the globe. In the world I create, friendship is bigger than marriage and my friends agree with me and I will never be abandoned or discarded or unloved.
Of course, I am still lonely.
I can write all the essays I want about my beautiful friends and the wonderful relationships I am apart of, but the truth is, I do still spend a lot of time feeling alone. There are good days and bad days, and sometimes the bad days convince you that everyone would be better without you.
What my old therapist failed to understand is that sex and marriage cannot solve all the world’s problems. There isn’t a void inside me because I’m not fucking someone. There’s a void inside of me because I am human, and to live is to yearn. You can be in a happy relationship - romantic or sexual or otherwise - and still want more. You can still be lonely or sad or anxious. Before I knew I was asexual, I still craved attention, I still wanted to be known, I still feared I would be left behind. I don’t think getting a boyfriend would have fixed anything (especially because a fourteen-year-old boy could never have fully understood the multitudes I contained), and that was true regardless of whether I came out as ace or as straight.
However, that void within me, that intense loneliness, that desire to be seen and loved and appreciated refused to disappear. I carry it with me always, just like my therapist prophesied. But it doesn’t exist because there’s something wrong with me or because I’m doing something wrong, it’s just always there for everyone who wants to find connection with other people. It’s like grief, it doesn’t go away. But that isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t something to run from. It’s a barometer, a measuring cup, a check-in point to tell you that you need something. It’s a feeling. And feelings come and go.
But here is what I know now: the answer to that void within me was never to fill it with marriage, it was always to fill it with friendship.
Sometimes it overwhelms me, the love that I have.
A lot of people believe that aromantic people will tragically never know love. That they aren’t capable of feeling it or finding it or caring about it. And true, there are some aro people who genuinely do not give a fuck about love, and they are perfectly happy with their lives…but that could never be me.
Love is woven into the tapestry of my life in gold thread. It is constant, it is overpowering, it is transformative. It is stitched through my childhood, connecting the branches of my family tree, shimmering like the North Star. I hear it in melodies old and new, tying me to people I know now and knew then and have yet to meet. Love is the books I read and the photographs I capture and the food I eat. It is late nights and long conversations and cross-country drives and texts in the morning and meals shared and movie marathons and spare keys and a couch to crash on and brunches and milkshakes and terms of endearment and not letting me isolate myself. Love is two people sharing their honesty in the hopes that they get to keep doing this on and on forever. Love is watching people grow and mourning who they no longer are and trusting that you will find each other in every new iteration of your lives.
I’m sad whenever I think about how unloved my younger self felt, if only because I know now looking back that the love was overflowing within and around her. I see that love every single day reflected back in the people who are still here, but I also see it in every single person that has walked out of my life, by choice or by necessity. When I catalogue the people I have loved, the ones who saved me and supported me and sanctified me, I feel like I am staring into the sun. Even the people I’ve lost have this glow about them, as if the universe remembers when it used to orbit around the two of us. And no matter how we left each other, I can still recall our days in the sun, just me and my friend and that extra special day where we both felt invincible because we were together.
I may never have kissed a boy or been on a second date, but I have fallen in love. I fell in love with my first best friend from the moment I popped out of the womb, overjoyed that I had a sister, even if she wasn’t related by blood. I fell in love with a girl in my elementary school, an only child who took me to Disney World and let me play with her GameCube, who made me laugh until I cried and didn’t think I was too weird. I fell in love with a dancer who loved fiercely and taught me about generosity and continues to care about me from miles and miles away. With an actress who loved cats. With an artist who painted my portrait. With a writer who shares my soul and finds me in every universe. I fell in love with a zookeeper who taught me how to feel and a guy who did cocaine and a kid who grew up in Texas and a cinephile and an archivist and an activist and a theologian and a softball player and a queer writer (okay, many queer writers) and and and.
My list of lovers is extensive and elaborate and every year I fall in love a little more. But none of these relationships felt magical when I was young. I took my close friendships for granted, thinking that everyone has a best friend they’ve known their whole life, that they’ve stayed close to for nearly thirty years. I assumed that everyone wrote songs with their best friends, that everyone shared excessive mix tapes and sent obnoxiously long emails and convinced their friends to skip Valentine’s Day with their boyfriend to hang out with their single friend. Friendship has been normalized in my world for a long time, and it just didn’t seem very special to fifteen year old me who thought that if she just went on one date she would finally understand why all her friends were so obsessed with boys and sex and kissing.
I always thought I was missing out on a vital life experience, that someday someone would swoop in and call me gorgeous or buy me expensive gifts or take me away on a fancy vacation or take candid photos of me on their phone or cook me a nice dinner or ask me what it was like growing up or read the books I recommend or go to the movies with me or hug me when I’m sad or make me feel understood. But guess what? All of those things happen to me on a regular basis. Over and over again. In my friendships. I’m already in love. I just didn’t realize that all that love could happen without a sexual contract. And even if I’m not romantically attracted to anyone, I get caught up in romance every single time one of my friends shows me love.
Once I started treating my friendships like the magic they are, the world opened up for me. I didn’t stop being lonely, but I learned that I’m not alone. I strengthened the relationships that were already there, already strong, and when I made new friends, I laid stronger foundations. I learned how to love better because I wanted to be the best for my friends, and the very best friendships of my life, my real partnerships, have not only born witness to my growth but they have taken the time to grow with me. Secure relationships take work and they should not be limited to romantic partnerships and marriages. Your friends deserve to trust you, to be listened to, to be apologized to, to see you as a safe space. And in turn, your friends owe you that too. Especially friends that hope to stick around.
A few weeks ago when I had COVID for the second time, I had a few rough days because all my friends were too busy to text and my friends in town couldn’t hang out with me. The loneliness devoured me around day three, to the point that I actively had to remind myself that nobody hated me, that they would text me back again soon, that it’s okay to spend some time alone. Easier said than done.
The only thing that truly saved me, and the thing that continues to save me throughout the course of my life, was a book. I read Happy Place by Emily Henry which is a lovely story about a group of 30s friends who’ve known each other since college who are slowly drifting apart. I had a hunch that I’d enjoy it, but I had no clue how much it would affect me at the time I read it. By the end of the book, I was sitting up in bed, tears streaming down my face, mucus lodged up my nose, feeling utterly and completely undone by the idea that my friends loved me. That even if and when we drift and change and grow and move away, we are still in love and that love can withstand a lot of shit if you’re willing to fight for it. And so many of my friends are willing to fight for me.
Every day I am unraveling the lies I was told in my youth, and I’m learning so much about adult relationships. I’ve spent the last years of my twenties trying to be a better communicator and a better friend, and even though I’ve made a lot of mistakes, my friends wake up every day and choose grace. And yeah, that’s pretty huge and important. But equally important is the realization that people are not ours forever. We borrow people for a time, and sometimes it’s a long time, but in the end they are not ours to keep. And usually that doesn’t mean they hate you or that they leave because they don’t enjoy your company anymore, it just means that things change and relationships don’t stay the same and that’s okay. I was raised to believe that we were all searching for our forever people, and the truth is that those people do not exist. We choose our forevers, and sometimes our forevers don’t choose us back. This is true in romance but it’s also true in friendship. But even if you don’t have forevers, you have to appreciate the sometimes and the seasons and the here and now. “You can’t take loved away,” as Tamsyn Muir says. It doesn’t make the love less special because it doesn’t last as long. Sometimes it means more because it didn’t last forever.
But as I sat there in bed weeping, feeling the loneliness fade away with profound clarity, I was overcome with love. Little me was convinced she’d never find it, that it was a mystery we’d never uncover, and it’s such a relief to know that the treasure was hiding under our noses the whole time. That I still cannot hang up the phone when I talk to my sister Hannah even after three hours, that I’m going to watch my best friend Laura get married in the fall with the photographer we picked out together at eighteen, that I hold hands with my best friend Julia on the car ride home, that my best friend Haley texts me at 7am because we’re both awake, that my friend Abi sends me TikToks of people talking about how much they love their friends because it made her think of me.
I never thought I would actually get a love story, and it turns out I have dozens. And most of them don’t end in heartbreak or cruel break-ups. It’s a wild thing to realize, that I can finally answer the question “Have you ever been in love?” and the answer is a resounding YES! but I’ve only ever been on one date and I’ve never kissed anyone and I will never have sex with another person and most of my true loves have been women and all of this can be true. My love stories are grander than the world would lead me to believe, and it is my duty and my privilege to make these stories sacred. It is up to me to make love, not whoever’s supposed to be in my bed.
One of the best things I ever did for my adult self was find my current therapist. They’re nonbinary so I told them upfront in my entrance paperwork that I’m asexual, and we get along really well. We’re working through my neurodivergence at the moment (more on that some day in the future) and I’m so incredibly grateful for the safe space they’ve given me. Counseling is such a transformative practice, and even though it took me a long time to get to where I am now, I know that it’s made me stronger.
It’s powerful to look back on all these experiences and feelings I once had. The girl I knew at thirteen is not so different from who I am now, but she got a lot of things wrong. Even who I was a few months ago seems distant, like she’s a few software updates behind. It’s a constant reminder that life is long and we go through so many seasons, and even if we lose things along the way, it had a purpose. The purpose was bringing you to this exact moment, this current version of yourself. And yeah, it’s hard to be a teenager and it’s hard to be single and it’s hard to make and keep friends…but didn’t we have fun?
Life is so much bigger than you thought it was at fourteen.
Hi from a nonbinary ace autistic! I wish I’d known more about this growing up. I’m almost 40 and only realized this about myself after being married and having a kid.
I’m glad you found a therapist that’s a good fit (it’s so hard!) There are so many ways to find connection and belonging in this world and I hope you find it in the ways that are aligned with you.
I really enjoyed your writing voice. Right now I’m curating an open call for Neurokind if you’re interested in submitting. It’s on Substack and I’m working out how to print zines. The link is http://neurokind.art
This was so insanely beautifully written, thank you 🥲