Often imitated, Never bested

Bi lesbian: I’m willing to engage beyond basic package friendship primarily with other trans people and a handful of cis girls. Most of those cis girls end up being trans after a while tho so take that how you will. The most effective way I’ve found to shorthand describe this is “bi lesbian”

Aroace: I don’t experience romantic love and I’m sex neutral to sex averse currently, and meaning I don’t experience actual sexual desire. I still love my partners but not in a romantic way and I’ll still have sex with partners if they want it and I’m in the right headspace, but it’s not something I really seek out on my own anymore.

I discovered I was asexual before any other form of queerness, actually. I had never heard of it before, and I was hooking up with people at a uh. Significant rate to prove to myself I wasn’t “broken” for not experiencing actual sexual desire correctly. Then I discovered asexuality and went “wait, you mean I’m not just broken? This is an actual thing other people feel?” and started seeking out ace and queer communities.

Realizing I was ace was the catalyst for me starting to enter spaces that allowed me to investigate my gender and sexuality further! If it hadn’t been for finding community through my asexuality, I would’ve taken so much longer to realize I was trans and a bi lesbian.

I had a similar experience with realizing I was aromantic, circa early 202..4? I’ve gotten around a lot, in a LOT of ways, often consecutively because polyamorous, and around that time I was having a small crisis over the fact that I thought it felt I had never truly felt loved by anyone in the same ways I loved them. I had jokingly described as “hyperromantic” until this point, because I wanted to love and be loved by many, to cultivate deeper connections.

By this point in time, the amount of people I cumulatively had dated, hooked up with, had flirtationships with, and otherwise had “deeper emotional and/or physical interactions with than most friends” over the course of my life was upwards of a thousand, and I ended up spiraling hard over “how was it that over all these people who have expressed love, intimacy, or deeper care to me, I’ve never once felt loved in the same way I feel myself living other people? What if there’s something wrong with me and I’m simply fundamentally unlovable? What if I’m broken? What if- wait this is EXACTLY how I felt about sexual desire growing up and I ended up being ace. Am I aromantic? Am I really fuckin doing this again?”

So I reached out to multiple Aro people I knew (like @3rdbogwitch2theleft 💖) and asked “How did you know that you were asexual/what does it feel like to you?” And I got back a bunch of different answers, but that all cumulatively ended in me realizing I’m Aro as well, that all these people who say they love me didnt just “not truly love me”, but that romantic love is simply not something I can experience, and I had invented an idea of what romantic love was supposed to “feel like” in my head that no person could ever possibly make me feel, because it was just that, an invention.

And then I went to my best friend/QPR @skelejor with this revelation and xe hit me with “wait I thought you figured this out years ago and just didn’t like the label. If I had realized you didn’t know I would’ve said something I’m so sorry.” 💀😭

So now I love but recognize it’s not romantic love, and that doesn’t make my love any lesser, and doesn’t make the love that others tell me they feel for me any lesser either. 💖

1. Peer reviewing these.

2. Yeag being Black and AroAce is hell bc like. The number of whites (but honestly other non-Black folks too) that get a wide range of unhinged for not being sexually or romantically available to them is horrific.

TW; rape, SA, racial abuse

I quite literally cannot use the same standards of “would this qualify as someone raping/sexual assaulting me?” towards myself as I would for others because I feel the number of times I’ve done shit with a white person solely because I realized in the moment I was in a “oh, I don’t get to say no and walk out of this safely, physically or socially” situation would like.. dilute? The impact of the more serious times I’ve been raped/SA’d. Like, there’s a significant difference to me between how early on, the ex that enslaved me would force me to have sex with her under threat of her killing herself or calling the police and lying to them, and having sex with a honky once to appease their ego and then being able to politely turn them down/make excuses after that.

Like, realistically, I’ve been raped by whites this way a few dozen times because it was a situation in which I realized I could not safely say no because I’m Black and they’re not. But it doesn’t carry the same traumatic impact for me as the times that were much, much worse than basic coercion.

This feeds into the romantic/Aro side of things too, not just the ace side. One of the pair of exes I often refer to as “the lynching exes” used a similar situation/tactic to coerce me into dating her. We were dating two of the same people and would flirt/mess around, and I had told her repeatedly that while I did like her and may want to date her later, I wasn’t in a position at the time to date anyone new because of how many partners I had and two significant life crises occurring at once (losing my job and being told I had to move out by a certain time). We had met up to take a lewd photoshoot together as a present to one of our partners, and afterwards she forced a conversation where the only exit was agreeing to date her, even though I had repeatedly told her I wasn’t in a position to. I could tell in the moment, standing there half naked with her in her bedroom, that she had specifically orchestrated a moment in which I wasn’t allowed to say no anymore, that things would get much worse if I didn’t simply.. let her have me.

Which, if you couldn’t tell by the monicker of “the lynching exes”, was an accurate assumption lmfao.

Black bodies are not only desired but often seen as public fare—from old crackers touching our hair to having to hook up with someone because you can tell you’ll be punished if you won’t—and people will make you pay if you deny them what they’ve come to think of as rightfully theirs. Your love, your body, your time, it doesn’t matter if you’re aro or ace, you better still perform when they want it.

these days i smile when im mad and i speak quietly because even though im 5’5, smaller than most people in my life and very visibly physically limited, i get treated as if im threatening and as if im like people's abusive exes. i get treated like im stupider, like an animal or a piece of meat to savor or throw away. people will see me and think all kinds of things, even my partners and close friends, and it'll all obscure the truth that im a person with inside feelings too. people always act as if i dont have a mind, like there's nothing in here that suffers when im hurt and forced to hide that im hurt too. it's so much worse to have to pretend like im not suffering when i am, it's kind of worse than just suffering. ill get punished for all of it.

im so envious of white trauma survivors who get to heal, get to escape their traumatic environments, get to go to therapy and unlearn their unhealthy coping mechanisms. for me, im still in my traumatic space, im still being (racially) abused, still having my boundaries and my autonomy and my preferences and my mind and my body violated and still in need of the survival strategies ive used since infancy to get by. and that will probably always be the case.

I've always struggled with pressure flaking and notching, which is why most of the pieces available for sale right now were made almost entirely with direct or indirect percussion and very little pressure flaking

pressure flaking the traditional way places a lot of strain on the wrist, and with my hypermobility I could never do it safely

but it somehow never occurred to me in 6 years of doing this that I could just, come up with a different way of doing it?

so now I've figured out a way to brace the workpiece so I don't have to use my wrist, I'm still getting used to it, and I got so excited to finally have a comfortable way to pressure flake that I got a little careless and injured myself (if you squint you can see a little blood on the arrowhead), expect a lot more notched points as I develop this technique

and a reminder to myself that you're allowed to forgo the "proper" way of doing anything in the name of accomodating your disabilities

little messy, but I think it turned out well:

ada here! made something a little smaller than what eve usually does, but it's cute i think

Ode to the Moon

I'm really liking the possibilities that have opened up now that i can pressure flake reliably.

This piece started drawing inspiration from the Kimberley projectile points of northwestern Australia (one of a number of cases of indigenous peoples utilizing the glass of a colonial power to produce knapped tools).

It ended up going in its own direction somewhat, but I love the result.

God I really need to find more green glass so I'm less hesitant to use it. The bottom of this bottle turned out beautifully.

This is an old piece, one I made back in college, but still some of my favorite notching I've done.

Its shop, and if you want to talk to it about details, they have a tumblr at @prisma-art-collective!! Go check it out!

Some pics:

And what I bought from it!

People always get confused whenever I say different kinds of glass have different personalities. But this one fought me at every single opportunity.

It's so pretty and cool! Thank you so much @prisma-art-collective for making this!

Ripples and Waves

It's so pretty and cool! Thank you so much @prisma-art-collective for making this!