Internal Screaming

and guys my age stop by to tell me I remind them of their aunt, of their grandmother. This is a compliment and I take it as such. They confess to having tried crochet once, and I smile. They get back in line for the bathroom.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and a queer woman sits on the floor next to me, arranges her skirt, and smiles up at me. (I try not to blush.) She asks me all the questions on her mind about my craft and I answer them, hands still moving. We swap yarn sources. She doesn't stay, but she knows where to find me.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and everyone knows where to find me when they need a minute, when socializing is too much and the music is too loud and they need to catch their breath. They pretend to be checking in on me, which is sweet, but I can see the relief in their eyes the moment they stop performing for a house full of people. They sit down and tell me things and all the while they never take their eyes off my hands.

1. #hey guys i'm polyamorous (has multiple friends)

2. #what in the amatonormativity

3. #well thats a new one #thanks i hate it

4. #there's a lot to unpack there

5. [first two tags in all caps] #wait this is so funny actually #im in tears help #sorry aromantics you can only have one bestie now #choose wisely [thinking emoji]

6. #and today in Igbt discourse: #Is It Allo to Have More Than One Friend #more at six #anyway this is insane I want to study anon #lgbt #aro

7. #people just spit shit these days

8. #im going to start gaybaiting but with friendships instead

9. #are we all catholic all of a sudden

10. #no no I like this. let's make up some more rules #I wanna see the callout posts

11. #i believe sometimes wrong takes are actually right if they're funny enough. this is one of them #aros? if you have more than one friend you're a slimy cheating bastard #unless you're in an open friendship!!!!

12. #I'm a cheating platonic whore #my legs aren't spread but my arms are #friends get in there #let me give you a hug

13. #gonna sit down with my friends and be all serious and looking at each of them with a grave look in my eyes #'so. I have gathered you all here today for some specific reason as you can probably guess' #'but I want the truth out there and I will refuse to live in secret any longer' #my friends look at me in utter confusion one of them already wants to start saying that they have figured out already that I am not straigh #I lift a hand and cause them to pause #'guys...l am friends with all of you' I say solemnly and dramatically pause afterwards 'I cheated on every single one of you' #no one understands what I am talking about

14. #us aromantics can only have ONE FRIEND #less we dispoint the curch with our scandolus cheating

15. #finally #slut status

16. #i always knew deep down that i was a whore

17. #stop being friends with everyone you slut

18. #"I'm in my slut era!" <- aros when they have more than one friend at a time #Yeah because I have friends while being in a qpp I'm a slut now. #Sorry babe I'm a problematic man

19. #fellas is it alloromantic to have more than one friend?? #by having a partner am I cheating on all of my other friends?? #stay tuned??? #aromantic #aroace

20. #it’s true i’m in multiple friendships and now they're making me pay child support on the christmas gifted plushies and plants. #when people in elementary school told me "you can only have three best friends" they were actually poly allies

21. #now THIS is the kind of aspec discourse i wanna see #(especially since the crazy take came from an anon so there's no risk of people dogpiling anybody's account) #truly though this is some seriously amatobrained stuff. heres what i feel like happened here: #anon vaguely understands that aros don't adhere to the ideology of 'you must date ONE person and ONE person ONLY and anything else is WEIRD #but they don't understand WHY we do that... so they assumed that we continue to apply that whole mindset to friendships #so basically like. they took all the weird cultural bs surrounding romantic relationships and just 1-to-1 applied it to friendship #which is very incorrect and also very funny. me going through my friend's phone to make sure theyre not sending memes to anyone else [three angry emojis]

22. #oh you know us slutty little aromantics #slutting about with all our friendships and whatnot

23. #guess it's time to decide which one friend of mine is staying #who wants to do an elaborate game show kind of thing to win my friendship

24. #giving a yellow rose to friends that are allowed to stay until only one is left #like on the bachelor #except with friendships #the friendster

25. #babe wake up new aro rules just dropped

26. #its giving church #are you a puritan perhaps anon

YOU DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW HOBBY!

STEP AWAY FROM THE TEXTILES!

YOU DON'T NEED MORE YARN!

A weird joke to pull out, sure, but not panic-weird. You grew up a nerd. Your in-jokes are weirder. This guy, you decide, is unbelievably shy. Might have had bad experiences. Or social anxiety maybe.

You just give him a reassuring grin. “Definitely needs more plutonium,” you agree, and take a big bite of noodle, and something in him relaxes and he looks at you with a strange kind of understanding that you can’t really interpret, and from then on, you have a new close friend.

if you see a guy online with his girlfriend and he has a pride flag in his bio and your first reaction is to question whether hes even allowed to put that there, log off. the guy could be bi, could be trans, could be nb, could be literally any queer identity at all and it doesnt matter. its none of your fucking business. he could also just be an ally showing support, its none. of your. business.

you are not the queer police and it is not your job to make sure everyone in the queer community has the properly documented justification for being part of it. touch grass. you need to be normal about not knowing everyones labels and identities and about people keeping those private.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

Biden/The Former Guy

Biden/DeSantis

Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years. Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

"I truly do not want to go" and

Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won't be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:

Previous experience. Really no way around it. Now that I hit thirty, I feel like I have done enough things to know, intellectually, from experience, what will feel nice if I overcome the avoidance, and what won't. For example, every time I go to the beach, I wake up early and would rather eat a tire than get off the bed. But I remember that every time I got up and went to the beach, I was glad I did it. So I just get up, feeling like shit, and get ready, feeling like shit, and I get to the beach and magic!! I feel great, I love the beach!! Sometimes you just gotta do it scared feeling kinda like shit.

Am I avoiding the thing or getting to the thing? I have a lot of demand avoidance around just, y'know, getting up, getting ready and going out the door. Universal human experience. If I notice that doing the actual thing (Swim in the pool!) sounds nice, but I'm avoiding having to rally myself to go do that (Fetch swimsuit! Sunscreen! Towel!), then I know it's demand avoidance and I should just fucking go.

Is the thing making me feel excited at all or just anxious? I have had previous occasions when I did the opposite; I convinced myself it was just demand avoidance when I really just. Hated the thing. And wanted to stop. If you feel a mix of excitement and dread, or excitement and anxiety, that might be demand avoidance. But if thinking of doing the thing just makes you feel actively anxious, then yeah. You don't want to do the thing.