dongle

@the-rolling-libero THANK YOU yes the getting there was way scarier than the appointment itself! I feel like I got the hard part over with and now I can actually start trying to Make Progress™

Like, I trust that aroace kids and aces who aren’t aro and aros who aren’t ace know their own life experiences the best, and can decide which labels suit them. And if it turns out they were just a late bloomer? Good for them, they found who they were! But the existence of late bloomers doesn’t mean that ace and aro kids can’t tell who they are.

I want a world where kids are freely able to identify as any aspec identity at any age. Some will turn out to be late bloomers, and they can change their labels as they see fit with no shame. Some others will never feel attraction and always keep those labels, like me. And still others will eventually feel attraction but still be somewhere on the ace-spectrums and/or aro-spectrums, and can choose whether they want to use specific grey-area labels or continue to use aromantic and/or asexual as umbrella terms.

Stop acting like 'it's just a phase' means that what a person is feeling RIGHT THEN isn't real and stop scaring kids & adults away from finding labels & community out of fear that it's temporary

I don't identify as ace these days. I have casual sex now. I could accurately be called a late bloomer, but the ace community and ID was a huge comfort to me as a "weird" teenager who had never felt sexual attraction towards someone. Labels can change. they can be fluid. that doesn't mean they're any less important.

Trains through the Mojave, CA

your echoes came back, you’d be here soon

[ID: A total of eight tweets from Taliesin Jaffe @.executivegoth which together read: “2020 is almost over and I feel I have something to get off my chest: I didn't get better. I didn't get healthier in mind or body. I didn't create, I didn't grow, and I didn't accomplish. It's fair to say I'm less together than I was this time last year by almost every metric. But I DID survive. and you know what? I'm happy to come to terms with that. Survival is absolutely enough. I'm learning to be more than good with that and I feel like you should be too. Seriously, well fucking done. I've many friends who've made huge strides. Solitude has given them time to accomplish goals of self improvement, creative output, or career advancement. Sometimes all three. THANK THE GODS. We're going to be relying on healthy people in the months ahead. Some friends have dealt with so much. Loss of health, loss of family. Some have slipped back into bad habits, or lost employment. And these experiences just WRECK you. I worry for friends in film, games, STEM, public service. Hell, friends who lost jobs at Disneyland. it's awful. Almost universally, these amazing people beat themselves up for lamenting their own pain when so many others are doing so much worse. It so hard for us to remember that neither success nor failure are a contest. Most people can't even agree on how to measure these concepts. As for next year; I've always hated the metaphor of the light at the end of the tunnel. Most change I've experienced in my life didn't happen in a day, and when it did it was usually less life altering then the change that took months. The road ahead is long. We're gonna need marathon runners, not sprinters. Accept help when offered. Offer help when (and only when) you have the bandwidth. We need you healthy. I've seen in my own life how much greater a force for good I can be when I have my shit kinda together. The real change I've observed in my life is less like a tunnel and more like a car heater. You turn it on and wait patiently to slowly feel your fingers. With that said, Happy New Year everyone, just two more months of winter. Let's get this '88 Corolla engine of a year idling.” /end ID]

Maybe the distinction is lost on some folks, but I dunno; for me, at least, it’s nice to be able to create dividers between catastrophes. If nothing else, it gives us a way to keep better track of them.