u/Illusion_AceofHearts

Alright, so I'm very strongly apothisexual, and since discovering this part of my identity, I've developed a very odd fear. Basically, my fear is that I'll be in a relationship and I'll be genuinely happy with that relationship, but then my partner will start feeling sexual attraction towards me. Now, I'm all for communication and I'd do my best to work through it with my partner, but I'm still scared. What happens if I become repulsed by an otherwise good and healthy relationship because somebody starts to feel sexual attraction towards me? I'm very confused about this fear as I've only had one relationship (I really don't get along with that guy anymore) and it never got even close to the point that this would be a concern. Does anyone else experience this fear?

So I'm gonna return to school soon, and I was very openly asexual with my friends last year, but I'm not particularly popular or well-known so it's not really common knowledge for everyone (not that I'm aware of, anyway). I only discovered about a week ago that I'm also aromantic spec , and I haven't had a chance to tell more than a few people about it. I intend to be very open about it, but I won't go parading my identity around the school or anything. I also know that the more "popular" kids (which are really just people who are able to be known by everyone in the school, have a really big friend group, and conform to gender/sexuality heteronormative standards) tend to make fun of people for being autistic, alternative, or acting in any way like furries. Pretty basic, predictable and mind-numbing school stuff that I've gotten used to. They also don't really show a particular level of understanding to trans identities, specifically those of trans people who don't "pass" as their gender, and I've heard them use the word "gay" (as well as "autistic" and even the occasional "down syndrome) as insults. It's honestly exhausting, and I highly doubt they'll be any better in regards to aroace people. There is one person in my grade who is aroace, and plenty of others who are ace but not aro (none who are aro but not ace so far, maybe someday), but I don't think the popular kids really hear about it because our sexualities are pretty private and they have no real reason to know. However, I'm someone who the popular kids tend to target by asking random questions about the types of things they openly mock in any other environment. It's odd, but it never really bothers me and I often answer with an oversimplified version of the truth and a passive-aggressive tone. If they ask questions, I'll give them education, maybe it'll get through their skulls someday. However, now that I'm aroace I'm a bit concerned about the potential of their "genuine" questions reaching that topic. I really do not want to explain to say "little to no of sexual or romantic attraction" to a bunch of immature teenagers because I know they will lose their minds and start spewing weird brainrotted shit the moment they hear the word "sexual" exit an unpopular kid's mouth, and I don't want to deal with it. I will gladly explain it as "little to no attraction of any kind, other than aesthetic attraction or admiration," but I know how many sarcastic and not at all engaged follow-up questions that will be asked for the sole purpose of them being able to laugh and make fun of me more. I genuinely don't really mind, it doesn't affect my self-esteem and it just shows their own stupidity, but it's still annoying and makes my brain hurt.

Y'all, I'm gonna be real, I really don't wanna let some fake popular kids prevent me from being open about my sexuality. This is just a bit exhausting and it's getting to me after so long dealing with it, and I don't know if it's worth the risk of having to explain what being aroace means to people who I know don't really care that much at the end of the day. It doesn't help that I'm demiromantic, meaning that I have crushes sometimes (for those who are unfamiliar, I will only develop feelings for someone once I've developed a certain level of an emotional bond with them), and I know damn well the "popular" kids in my school aren't going to understand that someone can be aroace and still have crushes (which, in my case at least, are embarrassingly strong and very real). How should I manage this? I don't want to hide my identity from anyone who directly asks because I want to be able to be proud of it and love myself, but I also don't want to confuse those who are genuinely curious (or people who like me that I might also end up liking someday), and I don't want to risk gaining overly negative attention from people who will mock me and the numerous parts of the LGBTQ+ community that I belong to behind my back. Even worse, I might be the one to get in trouble if I try to explain asexuality and the "popular" kids spiral out of control because the teachers in my school are very strict about people saying cursewords and talking about "topics that aren't appropriate for school," and there's a very small chance that anyone will know what asexuality is ahead of time because it's not taught to us in Sex Ed, I learned about it truth GSA and personal research. There was like one slide in one of our Advisory classes (which, surprise surprise, the GSA club made and organized) that gave a basic description of the asexual/aromantic spectrums and some basic microlabels. I loved that slide and everything about it, I'm so proud of my friends who joined GSA earlier than I did and made that slideshow, but I don't think any of the people I'm worried about actually pay attention to Advisory class. It's a great way to raise awareness, but no one remembers that slide except the ones who already knew most/all of the information on it. I really don't know what the best move is here. Any advice?

OK so I've had one boyfriend before, and our relationship was fine but I wasn't particularly torn apart when we broke up. After that, we were friends for a while, but we slowly started to grow apart. He's always been a bit of a blunt and sarcastic person, but for a while that was just how he was. Recently, though, he became...worse, somehow. He deceived one of our mutual friends, kept making comments to me about how this friend liked him more than me, and shit-talked about the friend's partner behind both of their backs. Eventually, I got sick of playing free therapist and am working on cutting him off, but I'm not sure what our mutual friend thinks of the whole situation now that I finally told them. I won't say much more about that in this post, but I may post something about it somewhere else once the wound is less fresh. Still, things have been...really tense with my ex lately. We can barely tolerate each other sometimes, but it's difficult for us to be in the same room together as he's very confrontational and I can hardly say anything without him objecting. I want to tell him that I'm aroace myself instead of him hearing through someone else, but I'm trying to contact him the least possible (which is not at all right now) because literally seeing his name in my text history can trigger self-hate inside of me sometimes and I don't want to deal with him right now. I'm also scared that he might blow up, considering we used to date each other. I think maybe I'll come out in a group chat with someone else there so if he blows up about it there's at least a witness, and I'll screenshot his reaction and send it to my friends if anything bad happens, but I also don't know if I'm ready to contact him or prepared for how he might react. I did genuinely have feelings for him when we dated (my feeling dwindled a bit in the last few months but were still there until the breakup) because I'm demiromantic and I do have romantic feelings for people sometimes. Should I just have him find out through someone else? If I do tell him, what's the best way to do it?

So I recently began identifying as demiromantic, but I'm a bit unsure if it's actually right for me. I've seen other posts that were kinda similar to mine and everyone was very validating towards the people who made those posts, but I'm still not sure. I've identified as asexual (specifically apothisexual or sex-repulsed) for a while, but I only started to think about being demiromantic a few weeks ago and only began openly identifying as demiromantic 3 days ago. I feel strong aesthetic attraction towards people that I find pretty/cute, but I don't ever want to date people that I don't know well, and I don't develop crushes until I'm pretty close to someone. It could just be trust issues, because I've had bad friends in the past, but the trust issues that I have are mainly tied around friendship and chosen family, not really romantic feelings, so I feel comfortable using the label demiromantic. The thing is, I feel a bit weird about using the term "aroace" to describe myself if I'm still interested in dating, and I don't want to end up turning people off of me because they think I won't like them back. I guess I'm just getting a little imposter syndrome and feeling like I'm not aromantic enough to call myself aroace (I don't get as much imposter syndrome about being ace) and not wanting potential partners to back off because they think I can't develop feelings for someone. Being demiromantic also makes it tricky to just tell people I'm aroace and tell people that I'm demiromantic once I become interested, because if they were interested in me they might back off by the time I develop feelings for them. I am barely out to anyone, just a few friends right now, but I'm scared of what will happen when I come out more publicly. I've also dated one person in the past, but we broke up (he broke up with me but it was fairly mutual), and now we don't really get along. I don't want to attract any more negative attention from him than I already have, and I'm worried that he might hear that I'm aroace and get mad at me because he could think I faked liking him, even though we're both very much over each other, because he like confronting people, especially me, about everything. How do I navigate coming out and explaining this to people without confusing them? Sorry if I overshared or ranted too much, I'm just really confused right now.

I originally posted this to r/TrueOffMyChest but was recommended by the algorithm to post it here as well, so here I am.

I have a very abnormal issue that I've come here to confess: I'm not used to feeling loved in a group or having any feeling of belonging/family with anyone at all, and now I'm forming a chosen family after one hell of a lot of failed friendships throughout my life and I don't know what to do.

Background: I went through a lot of friends in previous phases of my life. Every single time, I'd meet someone who I liked (platonically) and got along with pretty well for a while, but after a few months they'd start to prioritize others over me, or they'd make comments about my body/personality that would make me feel uncomfortable or dislike myself, or I'd just start to feel othered by their actions and get this agitating sense of not belonging. Sometimes friends would even move away before this happened. There's so many friends that I've lost count, some of them are from my younger years and I barely even remember them, just a few moments or a face or a name and nothing else. Whenever I saw the signs, I'd subconsciously prepare myself for the worst. I only split things off with two of my past friends, one casually and one I blew up on (I regret the second but I'll explain later). Eventually, I began to believe that part of my brain was just broken, that I didn't deserve to be loved or have people that felt like family or be the first priority the way other people did. I genuinely blamed myself for so long, and sometimes I still feel like I don't deserve my friends and think they should leave me and find someone better. I don't know why I still think this, my current friends are amazing people and make me feel like the most loved person in the world, but I think that's what scares me now. I'm just so used to being the third (or fourth, or fifth) wheel and not fitting in that having a place to belong and finding a chosen family just doesn't feel natural, however much I want to have it.

The one regret: I have one friend that I really regret cutting ties with, we'll call him Jackson. I was friends with him for a few months, but then he started talking to one of our mutual friends (we'll call this guy Bob, he's not that important to the story) more and ignoring me. It got to the point where Jackson and Bob would be talking and they'd be so deep into the conversation that they wouldn't even hear me (looking back, I'm starting to wonder if they were really just friends...nah they're both straight as far as I know so it's probably nothing), and eventually I snapped. I got into an argument with Jackson and I was really really petty and I hate even thinking about it now, but over the next two weeks after that I avoided both Jackson and Bob as much as I could, and all of the positive memories of our friendship (and I wanna be clear, there were a lot of them) just...faded. For a while, I didn't even know that I was missing any memories, I thought Jackson was someone I talked to every few days but we weren't that close, and then we got into a fight and stopped talking. However, that story stopped adding up after a while, because I still remembered the argument and some other moments pretty clearly, and they didn't add up with someone who I was barely friends with. Eventually, I was talking to someone and they casually mentioned that they used to think Jackson and I were together, even though we weren't (I didn't know that chosen family was a thing at the time but that's kind of the dynamic I had with Jackson). When I asked why, the friend said it was because we used to spend a lot of time together, and I bluntly responded that we didn't. After going back and forth for a bit, I got confused and asked another friend about it, and they confirmed that this was true, thus leading to my realization that I had memory loss. This isn't directly connected to the main story, but it was one of the most important contributing factors to my anxiety about closeness to others, specifically regarding chosen family (knowing that Jackson was chosen family at one point and knowing that it could fail).

Current Group: I love my current friend group, I want to make that very clear. They are all amazing people and having made my life infinitely better, and they were my main allies in figuring out my gender identity and sexuality, which had been a bit chaotic (I'll elaborate on identity and some loose parts of my discovery journey if specifically asked, but I won't go into too much detail). However, I'm still traumatized enough that my memories haven't come back, and that's made it infuriatingly difficult to trust my new friends. One thing that's really important in the equation of this whole situation is platonic physical contact and affection. Most of my previous friends barely even hugged me, and never held my hand or made any attempt at physical touch as a comfort method, so that's what I've been used to my whole life. Then I join this group, which is very physically affectionate with one another pretty much daily, and also very respectful of boundaries. There are two people who I'm closest too in this group, we'll call them Henry and Ava. I knew Ava previously (I kind of dragged her into this group and it ended up working out), and we're fine with leaning on each others shoulders and hugging now but we didn't really before we were part of this group. However, Henry was very physically affectionate right from the beginning. He hugged me like every time we saw each other and leaned on my shoulder constantly, he'd also lie in my lap sometimes. I never minded this (which is my traumatized-ass way of saying that I have always wanted a friend like this) and would almost always return these gestures. Still, I was not used to physical affection from anyone (I stopped accepting hugs from my parents when I was like 8 and they mostly stopped trying when I was 10, stopped accepting kisses from them way earlier), so I had instinctive limits, even if I didn't actually want to. I need to say this, and I hope it's very clear: I do want to be comfortable with this level of physical affection, it's something I've wanted and not had in my friends since I was a little kid playing in sandboxes and arguing over toys, but I was so unprepared for it that my mind instinctively closed and locked that door before I even knew what was happening. I've used sarcasm as a coping mechanism for a while, and there were a few moments early on in this friend group where I saw similar patterns to what happened towards the end of my friendship with Jackson (these are long-resolved now), so when I felt ignored or sidelined I'd make a sarcastic joke under my breath, hoping Henry wouldn't here while also assuming he wouldn't care if he did, because none of my other friends ever really cared. A few times, he heard these jokes and saw the serious undertones, then hugged me and protested to try and make me feel more accepted. This was the type of friend I'd always wished I had, but by this point I'd already convinced myself that I didn't get to have these kinds of friends, so my brain would just completely shut off from panic and I'd push Henry away. He's always look so hurt, just like Jackson did when we argued, and I'd always feel so bad and want to apologize, but when I tried to talk and explain I just couldn't bring myself to say it, I was so scared of being judged that I couldn't talk (I'm suspected to have Selective Mutism but I have yet to be diagnosed). This and similar things happened enough that I think it semi-permanently shut me off from certain levels of physical affection, and I don't know how to reopen that door without seeming too weak or vulnerable, which is an old trigger for me and I'm too scared of Henry judging me, even though logically I know he won't

Issues with vulnerability: Another main issue that I have is with being in vulnerable positions, both physically (lying down in front of others/in other people's laps, leaning on people's shoulders, etc.) and emotionally (talking about heavy subjects in my life, discussing my trauma/anxiety triggers in a non-joking way, crying in front of others, etc.), and it's starting to be something that causes a feeling of isolation for me. I want to be able to share my feelings with my friends, and I know they probably want me to as well, but I just...can't. I've hinted at it over email with Henry a few times, but never really gone that deep into it. He's very comfortable with ranting to me, and I love being able to support him, I just wish I was able to rant too sometimes. It's hard to tell him, and at this point I can't blame it on trust issues anymore, I've known him long enough and seen enough different sides of him that I trust him completely. The problem now is my fear of judgement, or the fear that he'll lash out and be upset with me for oversharing if I tell him anything. I don't know how to get over this, I feel so pathetic and useless right now. I am not requesting any advice, but if there's anything that y'all think will help me then you are free to share. I hate this whole situation and I hate myself for not being able to get the fuck over it and I just wanna be happy and have memories with my chosen family that make me happy and be able to feel like I make them feel as loved and happy as they make me feel.

Finally, because I don't want people accidentally asking me things that I don't want to answer, here are my boundaries with questions: You can ask me about my gender identity and sexuality, but nothing personal and nothing more that just what it is and what it means to me, please. I'll be sure to tell you if I'm comfortable with any more discussion than that (I will talk about my experience only to relate to/support others who may be earlier in their discovery phase than I am or who are trying to support someone who is). I'm chill with discussing my place on the aroace spectrum (part of the identity discovery bit from before) and explaining the meaning of my microlabels on that spectrum. Loose definition of Selective Mutism for those who don't know is that it's a type of anxiety disorder that makes it physically impossible to speak in certain situations or around certain people because of the anxiety that those situations/people carry. Mine is pretty tame most of the time (and not officially diagnosed, just highly suspected by professionals), but it has its moments. I am not open to being diagnosed in the comments and I don't really want to say anything more than I already have regarding my memory loss as it's a very sensitive topic and could cause me to involuntarily act cagey and aggressive (I won't say anything offensive but I'll be very triggered and angry and I hate myself when I'm like that), so please don't ask too many questions about it. If any boundaries are unclear, ask me about it and I'll tell you whether or not I'm willing to talk.

OK so I'm writing a book and I wrote in this one character (Ebony, 13ENBY) who is one of the main characters, I write from their perspective every third chapter. I did not create them as a sona or any optimized version of my life, but I have found myself secretly kinsidering them for a while now (like a week and half maybe?) and I just kinfirmed them after writing a scene where they come out as demiromantic to their brother. Is it actually possible to kin with an OC that I created, or is Ebony just my sona now? I want to be very clear that I did not intend to make them my sona, and they are not a self-insert (or at least not any more than the other main characters), so I don't really know what the hell is happening. What do y'all think?

Just a reminder that being nonbinary come in all shapes and sizes. Some people want to transition and change their appearance a lot, and others barely change or don't change in any way other than using new pronouns or a new name. All of these things are valid. AFAB nonbinary people who wear feminine clothing or present in a feminine way are valid. AMAB nonbinary people who wear masculine clothing or present in a masculine way are valid. Nonbinary people who go through HRT and/or surgeries to try and pass as the opposite of their AGAB are also valid. We're all nonbinary, but we're also individuals, and we all transition differently. We all feel different types and levels of dysphoria. This is a reminder to anyone who doubts their identity or is struggling with imposter syndrome right now that your identity is valid and nobody else has the right to question it. YOU are the one that gets to tell other people YOUR identity, just like they tell you theirs. It's other people's jobs to respect your identity, just like it's your job to respect theirs. Life gets better, there are people in the world who will accept you. You just need to keep fighting through the hard times and keep searching for the ones who will help you reach better times. You can do this!