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sharing in confusion and detail, hoping for whatever I can get


jsx0

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hi aven! I haven't been active here in years, and actually almost lost access to my account, but I feel like it's time for another go.


background: male, 30. when I first found out about AVEN, around 3 years ago, I got that feeling of 'oooooooh, of course!' that I guess many newcomers get. the website and the community really did help me tremendously with feeling like I had a safe, caring and knowledgeable space in which to sort through issues that didn't seem to fit the outside world very well.


strangely enough, the last few years, during most of which I described myself (both to myself and occasionally others) as asexual, were the period when I was least active in AVEN. it is as if the calm and stability that the notion of asexuality afforded me kind of let me get on with my unexamined life. I settled on some form of the 'asexual slightly panromantic' self-identification and moved into a long latency period where I didn't really get out of my shell to look for a relationship; I think I accepted the fact that I wasn't going to be sexually compatible with anyone really, and that I would just have to find a way to be ok by myself pretty much for good.


in the meantime I moved to China for work&adventure, and landed in an environment where everyone - the other expats in my social circle - is very much sexual or gives out the appearance to be. good hearts mostly, but a bit on the defensive (or even the aggressive), and I sort of adjusted to it, and to a certain extent found my niche in it, meanwhile making some interesting new friends - with whom, however, I never felt comfortable being completely open about issues of sexual orientation. I presented myself as not interested in relationships and they didn't probe too much, which overall fit with my post-aven identification.


and then a few weeks back I met this girl while travelling. we'd read all of the same books, could quote poetry back and forth to each other, seemed to finish each other's thoughts, and any number of other cliches; and for the first time since before finding AVEN and making peace with being alone I felt like I was around someone with which I could exercise self-reflection, someone it would be amazing to see the world with, and someone with whom I could risk a relationship. and with that little spark of seeing myself in her, and thinking about myself, the whole edifice of an independent, stable me, a me who can get by without a relationship, collapsed. in fact it now feels like the last 3 years of my life were little more than a half-baked justification to cover up the fact that i was really just very sexually dysfunctional, and unable to handle the weight of that realization; and that i'd been secretly hoping all along just to find someone as dysfunctional as me, with whom the sex issue would be taken entirely out of the relationship, opening way for a different and less risky type of connection.


I was hoping to share my experience here and hear from anyone who might have been through something similar or even radically different; mostly I'd like to ask: how is it that you experience your asexuality? what has happened when/if you tried poking your head in the world of relationships? and of course 'what do you make of what I've been through'? so what follows is an attempted in-depth and detailed description of exactly what went down in the time I and her were together, of the mechanics of the mental states I went through.


going by aven's definition of asexuality, I'm pretty textbook - I can't remember how many times in life I was puzzled when people ask whether I find this or that person attractive, and I've spent more time than I'd care to admit trying to figure out what is it that people feel when they say "person X over there is hot". but now it seems like 'asexual' is such a broad label that there's room for so many different things within it, and I'd really like to know if there's anyone in there a little bit like me. after what went down recently, i now feel like I'm either addicted to trying to conjure out a sexual being out of who I really am, or else as if there really is something/someone sexual hidden below the surface of me, so well hidden that it makes it inviable to actually have a relationship where sex matters, but at the same time not absent enough to let me just get over it and be content with a life without sex. it's a tricky, uncomfortable, not too seldom downright painful place to be, when I happen to be in touch with it. and it makes me feel very lost.


(this already turned out much longer than I thought it would, and I feel like I owe it to myself to try to be as detailed as possible; so this is a good time to tune out if you're not in for a long and specific, and also most likely pretty boring, read.)


the girl. i'd been on a long holiday trip accross china before going back to work soon, and she was on the last leg of a year-long asia thing before going back to europe. we were travelling different ways when we first met, but we would have 4 or 5 days more or less sharing the same path. I felt intellectually drawn to her and always craving to hear her speak. nearing the end of the common part of our journey, we both got a little drunk and ended up making out; I told her I was 'asexual, and if not, at least terribly sexually confused', which at the time seemed to draw her to me even more; and we endep up going back to my hostel together and fooling around, now very intensely drunk, and getting just to the point of having sex, but no further.


after that, we spent the next few days sharing a hostel dorm room and talking. i often felt that connection again, a deep deep sense of 'i've never before found someone who seems such a perfect match for my head'. she, in turn, seemed a little less involved, but willing to get closer. we had some more conversations that felt like conversations i'd never be able to have with anyone else. on our last day together we talked for a long time, and sort of opened up to intimacy; she said for the last year she'd more or less decided she was gay; we cuddled overnight, and i think she felt enough of a connection herself that we ended up planning to meet again when our paths converged, and travel together for the last week of our respective trips. the official plan was to be cuddle buddies for a week, no sexual expectations implied, and to get to know each other better.


then we parted ways for a few weeks, exchanging occasional texts and talking on the phone once. during this time apart I felt confused in new and, well, confusing ways; I felt I couldn't be sure of her feelings, if any; and at the same time I felt as if talking to her was almost the same as talking to myself; as if I had really total freedom to say just what I thought; even better: as if by talking to her I could finally get to know what it was that I thought in the first palce; as if with her I could find a Me that I've always looked for and that I never usually managed to quite nail, usually having to settle for some more or less functional social persona on the several occasions when it's called for - and one that I'd been using intensely during my last few, solitary years.


but at the same time this sense of absolute identification (that you just have to suspect is quite a bit neurotic) threw me in and out of a strange, funky mental state. I would love to be able to explain exactly what it is that this state entails, but I feel that it's such a strange self-referential mindtrip that it barely lends itself to description. it does, however, impact directly on what I've been calling my asexuality. if on the one hand I felt like with her I found ways to become the person I think I am, at the same time the fact that I find this inner person kertwangs my entire mental structure and makes me self-aware to the point where all that I can be aware of is self-awareness itself. it is as if by finding myself in her I put two mirrors in front of each other or divide myself by zero or go through a phase shift into a strange thing that is at the same time total awareness and awareness of nothing. i've felt this same state the few times I smoked a little too much weed; like I can see the structure of my own thoughts and am reduced to the thing that observes itself from a distance. it can be unsettling, although it is so locked down into this self-referential structure that even the usual emotions that would accompany a bad trip, like anxiety or fear, have a hard time finding their way in. it is more like a perfect solid prison of so much consciousness that it is hardly even consciousness at all anymore; just a mental lockdown; a fugue state maybe. it makes me feel - literally - like spatial sections of my brain are grinding against each other and the tension is fizzling out as a grey cloud in the front of my forehead. and it slips away from any description i try to give it. more on this, and more, below.


eventually the time came to meet again. we had a little less than a week to spend together, and - for all valences of the emotional spectrum - it was the most intense period of time i have any memory of.


the first night we spent together we talked the whole night, and I can't find almost anything in my mind reconstitute what the conversation was. it was all over the place, full of double-self-referentials and trying to anticipate each other's thoughts and really so much meta-thought and attempted co-self-awareness that it probably decharacterized the content of anything that might have been said. I was definitely very close to that self-bottomless mental state the entire time, and now I'm not sure where she was. I can kind of pick up the thread of the conversation at around 5 a.m. when it became clear that whatever we had said, we had been talking at cross-purposes the whole time, after I admitted that what was throwing me off or making me hold back was fear that it would be so much harder for me not to fall in love with her than the other way around. my brain fizzles trying to draw back the memories of this night. i know I shared massive parts of myself - more than she did of herself - and I discussed what I perceived as my asexuality, and ended up kind of changing gear and saying I had to admit that sometimes I did feel some sort of a sexual urge; that there was something sexual somewhere that I didn't know what to do with. I seem to remember even drawing a little strenght from that, a feeling of 'you might have been hiding under the asexual label for the last few years, but you know that's not the whole story'. i think that's when I might have broken the spell of the identity aven provided me years back, and it felt at least partially honest. under that light, the whole talk turns into an attempt to excuse myself in advance for my sexual inadequacy. not the best way to start a relationship, but I suppose the only one I felt i had.


I think the net result of this long talk was me admitting that I felt really potentially very romantically attracted to her. I still don't quite understand what her side of the conversation was. somehow though we did create a shared safe space of honesty, i think; an expansion of the connection we felt (though the fact I'm having so much trouble piecing it back together should ring another few alarm bells).


what did unquestionably come to pass is that as we moved from cuddle to sleep, safe in the knowledge that we both had very little idea of what we were doing, we kissed and that kiss was the most absolutely sexually intense experience i have ever had in my life. she said it was the same for her. it was a near-tantric, lenghtless kiss, in which i could feel my entire everything. I don't remember ever before feeling so present in a moment, let alone a sexual moment. I felt totally and absolutely There.


it moves to be able to say that i was There; I feel like I've spent most of my life Not Being There; being removed from myself or from my life by several degrees; being detached. even writing this post I feel like I can only tap into what i mean to say for a few seconds at a time before i dissolve into this detached distance and have to force words out that turn out to be half-insincere but are all I've got. this is somehow correlative to the self-referential brain lockdown thing, but I can't quite work out how, and I feel almost no control over it. 'go go go, said the bird, human kind cannot bear very much reality' comes to mind, but the mechanics of actual total avoidance are quite a bit dicier. how does one even feel something that's not there?


but if there's one feeling I remember having always had with me it's that I wasn't present in my own subject, like I wasn't me inside myself, like whatever I was supposed to be - what other people seemed to manage being without breaking a sweat - wasn't forthcoming in me at all, and that any attempts to fake it were doomed to failure in the absence of a spontaneous emerging being that didn't have to fake anything in the first place. 'anedhonia', 'depersonalization', 'functional autism', 'foreclosed trauma' are terms that I or others have waved at myself to try to give shape to what i felt as shapelessness; almost comically, none of them stuck. but 'asexuality' did, for quite a while; i guess now i'm hoping to figure out whether i'm really entitled to it.


back to the sexual realm, one of the cruxes of the thing: this not feeling Real somehow, feeling removed from myself; or its other side, the feeling like all I am is my observation of myself, is what I think spills over into sexual attraction and nullifies it, for me. and, even after years of different sorts of therapy, I really don't know whether it's a state I'll always have with me as my default, or something I can work on. I don't even know whether I'd be capable or brave enough to let it go, or to distance myself from it, given the chance.


I feel that when I'm working or driking with friends or walking on the street Not Being Myself, most of the time I can kind of put up a show of being someone and function, to certain extents, in real life. to the point perhaps where the show becomes so automatic that I would in all honesty really eventually have to start calling it who I am. but in sex, on the other hand, there's no faking it (not for men, or at least not for me) - if I'm not there, I'm not there. the world of erections: pretty damn unforgiving.


that's not completely true either, the 'you're either present in sex or not'. being what I think in last instance is an affection-hungry emotionally-insecure fool, I tried my hand on a few relationships before making my bed with aven and cake. and though I've never felt the sexual attraction thing, there are situations, if i'm in bed with someone, where I feel bodily stirrings; what turn out sometimes to be at least enough desire for actual intercourse. these are a little unpredictable, and correlate directly to either how emotionally close I feel to the person or how excitingly new the situation is to me, and I doubt it ever gets to the point of what the average sexual person experiences as sexual desire. it goes towards both genders in more or less equal intensity, but feels qualitatively different for each. this is how I feel when masturbating as well - as if I'm hanging on to small loose threads of desire that dissolve away a lot more easily than it they are to hold on to. a bit like I'm chasing sexual desire inside my own mind and have to outrun it just to keep up with it. but the fact that I know that it's like a second-order substitute for desire - the strange awareness that i'm trying to behave sexually, when I get it - usually kills it off completely. it's a frail thing.


but back to the events: with this girl, that first kiss that first night, I was just there. there there there. i can't even explain the intensity of what I felt, and it makes me wonder if that's what people feel all the time going about their lives. it also makes me mourn the fact that it's not something I can just tap into and feel again at will. it was a biggie having it presented to me so totally; and it wasn't limited to the sexual: it was emotional as well, it was as if my entire body was experiencing something for once instead of just, from a distance, the back of my eyes.


i think that kiss surprised both of us a little. she said it was the most erotic kiss she remembers as well. it was based somehow on the fact that neither of us were really kissing; it was like just hovering exactly at the very last possible edge before a kiss, which in turn turned both of our entire bodies into this huge sensory organ. the less our mouths touched; or better yet the more-almost they did, the more intense it felt.


eventually it ran its course, or else mutated into a different sort of makeout in which I was holding her very tight; tight in a powerful and very sexual way; i remember feeling that that was the typical sexual role of a man, and that when I least expected I'd found myself exerting it, and actually feeling like it fit.


i think part of the safety-net contract we'd established through all the talking, even if perhaps unconsciously, was that we weren't going to have any real (in the sense of penetration) sex. so after feeling this all very intensely we eventually went to sleep, only to awake in the middle of another very intense kiss/embrace/touches that took us to the edge of desire again. and another round when we woke up.


(thinking in retrospect now, it's not that amazing having a taste of what i might spend the rest of my life missing out on)


instead of what travel plans we had for the day, we spent the day in our hotel room trying to go over what happened. eventually we went out for a walk, and I was, besides extremely exhausted, bursting with affection for her - which in public was only half reciprocated. she said she expected them to be separate things, whatever happened inside and outside our hotel room, and that she was a bit thrown off by my proximity.


i tried to understand, but felt myself a little hurt and pulling away. back in the hotel at night we went to sleep with a distance wedged between us, and what physical contact we did attempt felt like trying to emulate the previous night's formula, which was already very much not the same thing.


but the next day we woke up to, if i remember correctly, hugging each other to death. the rift felt restored. she started to open up a little more about her own life, sexuality, and feelings. among a lot of other personal stuff, she admitted to not feeling right masturbating, to having a hard time, as a rule, climaxing during sex, and to having to kind of fake her way into enjoying intercourse; also on the other hand to not knowing whether she has it in her to finally try being with girls. and to pulling away from feelings, often violently, and that I should be careful. and that this safe space of no sexual expectation we'd built, where we could talk about everything with no fear of disappoiting, was great, and was letting her discover things about herself. and that what we'd been doing should by all means count as sex, even though there was a no-penetration clause implied somewhere for safety. and that everything we did was sex and that there shouldn't be a set goal or target. all of which felt very true. the next few days were other instances of the same movement, going in rounds of more and more feeling safe and intimate, less and less clothes, and occasional yanky, disconnecting breaks, restored after sleeping or talking. if never as purely intense as that first kiss was, throughout it all I felt the most sexual I ever have; or the least threatened; or both.


by the third (fourth?) day we decided we had to move to another town if we were going to do any of the travelling we'd planned on, but barely made it to the train station, sneaking make-out sessions out on the street, before just making our way back to the hostel instead of moving on. and we talked ourselves into a glimpse of some sort of future in which we had this safe shared thing we'd been developing, and it fit with some sort of polyamorous world in which she could still explore her gay side and I whatever I wanted to; and we couldn't get our hands off each other, and kept moving on with the passion/affection. eventually we were both naked - for the first time - and I masturbated her to orgasm, even as I felt myself slipping away from the moment, and this time something changed that broke the cycle. and after it was over whatever magic of fantasy or shared mindscape we had built together, or I had believed we had built together, snapped loose. and she said she saw how bad things really were for me; that it really is tragic that I can't enjoy sex as much as she can; that she wouldn't be able to cope with not being desired; that we'd gone too far with the fantasy of a forgiving world where things fit and we look at ourselve and find innovative way to be. kw


i can't for the life of me remember what i said. and she said 'now I finally feel that I can tell you I love you', which was the saddest thing I've ever heard. we cried together for what seemed like hours. to still try to draw consistency from what happened, in this sorrow as well I felt absolutely Present and There. i remember in usual life not being able to cry for more than two seconds before my mind pulled me away from feeling, but at that moment there I could explore every side and bit of my sense of loss and failure, and feel it completely.


from that moment on, all I felt was vulnerable and pained and not at all sexy - although not detached either, I don't think. just too sad and hurt to have any room for a desire that's already fidgety, and too worried whether we could find a way to keep each other in our lives, and whether she'd even want that, and confused about how on earth I was supposed to make my way back to a stable shape for the coming year.


we spent the next few days doing reverse-cycles of distancing and pulling back together. our conversations still matched amazingly, and it still felt like we could talk and share and explore to a larger extent than I feel with anyone else, but, in her words, we knew we were slowly saying goodbye to each other. the move back into cuddle-buddies, which is what the whole thing was planned to have been in the first place, was arid. in our last night we kind of briefly found each other again in bed, which was as funny and unexpected as it was touching, but already from a distance. for two people who claim to be aware to the point of paralysis, the week was a pretty damn unconscious ride. we finally parted and kept uneasily in touch, both declaredly trying to find a story that makes sense of what feels like a near-manic week of oscillating between mad extremes of feeling and thought, believing each one position completely for as long as it lasts, then seeing them crumble as fantastic fancies as soon as we move on; and declaredly finding that story without losing whatever can be salvaged of each other.


beginning to get old, or at least feel it, and years past long spells of self-investigation, I don't think I should hold a lot of hope to be sexually very different in the foreseeable future from what I am now, extraordinary and not-to-be-counted-on moments of total connection excepted. at the same time it doesn't feel like what I am is entirely viable, with these bits of a sexual being poking out, and something would have to give to make my life work. for a few years it was this incipient, uncertain and unsustainable sexual part of me that got sacrificed. i don't know whether there's another approach. but sex or no, it breaks my heart to foresee an entire future with no one to share it with. the idea that what large parts of me still see as sexual failure might be the thing that wrests away from me the possibility of being with someone devastates me to a ridiculous extent. and at the same time, I've never really had a relationship in which sex wasn't the defining factor; in which other things intervene to make it work or not work; it's not easy for me to even conceive of sexually functional relationships failing at all, which goes to show how much the issue skewers my view of life.


i think i've spent my whole life irritatingly trying to gauge what was it that i was supposed to feel; or better, what it was that people felt, as a rule, so i could know whether i should think of myself as working by a different set of rules or at least find a way to get by with whatever tools I had. basically what was normal, and how anormal I was. tentatively looking out from this point of isolation, wondering what the world was like and never really reaching it, I've spent 30 years, the least painful of which were those under a label that really excused me from digging any further or having to confront its own limits, and mine. all of what happened during this past week was in a way hiding under that blanket provided by the word 'asexuality', and I feel there's no way I can know myself any better than I already do without someone else's experience to contrast to. like the loneliest thing for a loner is how much being alone itself drives you further and further away from people. and that, being an incomplete, contradictory being, there's no way I can go through life without some terrifyingly massive sacrifice, either of whatever is sexual and looking for affection in me, or of the peace of mind that allows me to get by under the aegid of asexuality.


i've been in therapy before and am making hopefully sincere arrangements to go back, but one of the reasons i left it was that it never gave me this sense of human contact that actual real sharing does. it means so much to me that i can hear from real people what their life is like; i do feel as if it fills a gap that i've spent my entire conscious life fighting to cover up, if not always fill up. and that life and people and love and especially sex are things so obscure to me, so opaque and unreachable and impossible to emulate, that I have no hope of navigating them by myself. reading over what I just wrote, I feel especially immature as well - as if by the age of 30 I should have figured most of this out, and that this in itself would justify my trying to move back away from being close to someone. at the same time this feels the most honest I've ever been with myself and others. I can't think of anywhere else I could have done it but AVEN.


thanks in advance for listening in. sorry for the lenght. here's some tear-stained cake.

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Sounds like an amazing little love story, be happy that you have had such an experience in life. I'm sorry for how it's ended. Maybe you are not totally Asexual, but somewhere on the spectrum, gray-A or demi. I feel maybe you do too much thinking, just be open to whatever that might come along. Not only that we live in a world where the only relationship to have is a sexual one. We, as Ace are also telling ourselves the only life to have is a life in a relationship with another person. It seems to me that you do desire for her, and you can please her just like another women can and some. Anyway you can pursue her now?

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Hi Chewy, thanks for the reply! Ironically my first reaction to trying to think less and take things as they come is a lot of thinking. I guess during my long take-life-as-it-comes period (which just turned into a not-really-interested-in-people period) I sort of forgot I had the ability to get hurt. But it did wake me up a little bit, and I'll see what I can make of it. Thanks again!


Hi Chewy, thanks for the reply! Ironically my first reaction to trying to think less and take things as they come is a lot of thinking. I guess during my long take-life-as-it-comes period (which just turned into a not-really-interested-in-people period) I sort of forgot I had the ability to get hurt. But the recent events did wake me up a little bit, and I'll see what I can make of it. Thanks again!

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Hi Chewy, thanks for the reply! Ironically my first reaction to trying to think less and take things as they come is a lot of thinking. I guess during my long take-life-as-it-comes period (which just turned into a not-really-interested-in-people period) I sort of forgot I had the ability to get hurt. But the recent events did wake me up a little bit, and I'll see what I can make of them. Thanks again!

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Hi Chewy, thanks for the reply! Ironically my first reaction to trying to think less and take things as they come is a lot of thinking. I guess during my long take-life-as-it-comes period (which just turned into a not-really-interested-in-people period) I sort of forgot I had the ability to get hurt. But the recent events did wake me up a little bit, and I'll see what I can make of them. Thanks again!

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*sorry for the multi-reply; chinese internet and AVEN don't seem to mix too well. can't even edit it out now =o

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Hi Chewy, thanks for the reply! Ironically my first reaction to trying to think less and take things as they come is a lot of thinking. I guess during my long take-life-as-it-comes period (which just turned into a not-really-interested-in-people period) I sort of forgot I had the ability to get hurt. But the recent events did wake me up a little bit, and I'll see what I can make of them. Thanks again!

I get hurt by people, so I stay away from them. None of them are really interested in me. They only call me up when they need something. When I do need some one, there is no one there. That's pretty cool, so, do you speak Chinese?

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I'm struggling with Chinese, but making occasional progress. Not exactly in a rush, and hoping to stick around for long enough to get a decent grasp of it.

And I still haven't learned the trick of solitude well enough not to leap right into every opening I get to know someone... it feels like I can get so little out of the world by myself that I can't afford to miss a chance of having someone's else's eyes around me. In other words, desperate. But in the original words, desperate with a kind of burning hope?

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Well, you're still young, the world is your oyster.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wow Chewey, I gotta thank you again just for having read through this mess! I hand't really realized how much I'd written there, and I don't think I'd even now be able to edit it down without significant loss. I think I was triyng to put down 3 years of stunted thought down before it all slipped away, and was just plain lucky that there was someone with a big heart and a large attention span hovering around.

You've earned yourself a big, sincere, cakefull brazilian virtual-hug!

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You, sir, get massive cake-points for out-posting my lengthy posts that have graced the servers of AVEN. I take my proverbial hat off to you ;)

I felt drawn to read your entire post. Your words carried my eyes down the screen. I can definitely associate with your words, from my own experiences. You're also a thinker. This, I certainly understand. I am also a thinker. I have always thought a lot about all sorts of things. All sorts of things from all sorts of angles. I'm usually looking from multiple angles simultaneously. I've always seen things as a giant jigsaw puzzle. The more things you see, the more things you know, the more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle you have and the larger the picture is.

I've also spent my life feeling like I'm looking in on what's going on. I vividly remember sitting back in lunch times at high school, watching others interact, feeling like they were part of a play that I didn't have the script for. I would then jump in and say something myself, and feel like my contributions were changing the script slightly. I would ponder how my interaction changed proceeding interactions, and imagine myself as part of the play. It was like I was the person, yet the observer at the same time. I didn't know which I was.

I knew other people didn't see things the way that I did, and that made me feel incredibly alone. I so desperately wanted to fit in with them all. I didn't like who I was, and felt certain that if I could be like them, that I would be good enough. And so I thought I could figure out how to do that if I analysed more and more - understood exactly what they all did, and emulate them.

The more I analysed, the more I came to understand, and the more connections between things I started to see. I started to notice patterns. In all sorts of things. I still had no idea who I was and how I would fit in with everyone, and still felt alone and incomplete, but I was able to use my powers of observation and analysis for good. For several years, before I learnt how to talk to other people about my feelings (I was a massive introvert) I was my own therapist. I analysed my own behaviour and thought patterns and by seeing the cause and effect cycles, I began looking for other alternatives. As bad as things have gotten (and I'm trying to be somewhat brief and not resort to entire-life-story), I have always had a part of me that wouldn't settle for what I perceived as reality. I always felt like I was searching. Searching for myself. Searching for something that made sense of everything. Searching for peace.

I can tell you that there is no "supposed to" way of being or feeling. Everyone has their own idea of what that is, and if you try to follow any one school of thought you'll end up feeling lacking. However, if you're open-minded enough, learning about all sorts of schools of thought from people from all sorts of walks of life, without tying yourself to one in particular, is a wonderful way to broaden your thinking. You see that everyone acts based on their own perceptions and belief system. If a belief system changes, a person's actions change. If a belief system can be that fluid, who exactly is the person? Are they their collection of beliefs, or are they something else?

From your words, it sounds like you're struggling with the same sense of self issues that I grown up with too. It also sounds like you have also noticed more than the casual observer and you're struggling to make sense of how that fits in with the generic "normative" perception of society.

I don't think you sound particularly immature at all. You sound just like everyone else. You're just willing to question things that others do not, that's all. And there is nothing wrong with that. Because with questions, come answers. Well, to be precise, with questions come more and more questions. But eventually, one must receive answers. That's just how things work.

What if you are not alone or incomplete? What if you have more answers inside you than you think?

Lol all my long posts seem to start and end in a similar sort of fashion :P

I can expand if you wish.

I hope this helps. In some way. At the very least, know that you are not alone :)

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Wow. Hi. Wow. I'm just some lurker here, I drop by every now and then in those moments of intense introspection, to read some stories, and to feel "safe under the blanket", as you so eloquently put it. So very many of your words correspond with what I've been dealing with, and you're so spot-on in describing what I never could in even my most articulate moods. THANK YOU (and everyone I never thanked before).

I'll have more to say in just a bit!

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Okay. So. Wow.

From what you describe, it seems to me that what you experienced with this girl was real in every sense of the word. Bittersweet as it may have unwinded, something really real happened to both of you, and your lives have changed for it. You're inextricably part of her life now, and vice versa - whatever the implications. I for one hope you stay an active part of each other's lives, I'd say you're both best off that way.

I too feel like I'm hiding under the blanket of asexuality, most of the times. Lately though, it's like I'm questioning the "hiding" part - if I am hiding, what from? Do I only portray myself as asexual because I'm too lazy and too scared to pursue a relationship? Looking back at past experiences, I've objectively and attestably behaved earnestly and innately asexual, so naturally I feel safe among like-minded people, but... Am I denying a part of me? (There's an awful lot of complicated backstory here, to come to this question at this point, maybe more to follow, elsewhere...)

It's funny: I actually came here to ask for insight, and you unknowingly provided a lot of the insight I needed weeks before I asked, in a very evocative way. So, again, thanks for sharing!

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I'm glad to hear something in our experiences connected! It's happened to me many times as well, finding something just so meaningful in the forums here; but I'd never been the one who shared first. On an update, me and her skyped yesterday and it was great, in a friends-with-baggage way. I do miss her, but feel myself slipping away from the feeling - planning to fight to hold on to it.

But wow, 'hiding from what' is a great question. If I really dig I can kind of see the knot of fear I carry around with me, but it's not easy to turn it into words. I think it's failing at another relationship; or better yet failing sexually and that being the relationship killer. Even more precisely, not being all the other people who wouldn't have failed at what I have. This evokes some intense, half-nightmarish fears (all garden-variety nightmarish fears, I'm sure), but even that doesn't really explain it all.

And I'd love to hear the complicated backstory :)

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