if it makes your life easier, don’t be ashamed to use it. mobility devices, braces, medications, etc. are nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed by if they improve your quality of life.
my heart goes out to anyone who was made to feel stupid for caring too much. anyone who was laughed at or "cringed" at for being themselves. anyone who cried silently so they don't be a burden. anyone whose love was taken for granted. anyone who feels unsafe in their own bodies. to anyone who felt devastated because others failed to be humane enough. it's not you, it's them. i hope you find a way to love yourself again. you're not alone. you're important.
changing every “i should have known better” to “i know better now”. i will not judge past versions of me through the lens of who i am now.
The past versions of you made some honest mistakes because they were younger, more immature and just didn't know better. They couldn't predict the future. Please don't be so hard on your younger self, they deserved better than what happened to them and they deserve your compassion, understanding and forgiveness. Tell them they are okay now, that they are safe, that they don't need to worry so much anymore. Nurture the parts of you that you couldn't nurture before so they can let go of all the hardships they went through. The world was already tough enough when it judged you. Don't be even worse to yourself. Be fair in your criticisms instead of being punitive and unkind. You deserved better back then, you still deserve better now. Tend to your past self. Help them heal their wounds so you can live a better present.
it’s okay if you’re still healing from things and people that happened years ago. it’s normal to still be hurt by things that happened to you and people who left you. just because you’re still healing doesn’t mean that you haven’t healed from parts of it already. it doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to heal because everyday you get stronger, even if it’s a bad day and you feel like nothing’s getting better. you’ve made it through all of those bad days and you’re still here and stronger than ever. don’t rush your healing!! just trust that with every second that passes you’re healing more and more and that there isn’t a specific timeline of where you should be right now. you’re doing so good and you’ve come so far already. be proud of the progress you’ve made instead of looking at how far you’ve still got to go. the person that you were a year ago would be amazed at the person you are now.
You never owe someone a chance when it comes to dating. You're always allowed to say no if you don't want to go on a date with someone.
You are not hard to love or difficult because of you mental, physical illness or disability. It is not your fault and others should provide kindness and support in any way they are able.
You deserve love and you will be loved. Your illness does not define you, or make you any less of a person. Never allow anyone to make you feel otherwise 💖
7 Signs that show you’re negatively attached to the past
1. You can’t, or won’t, talk about it.
2. You’re constantly being hit by “those same old feelings”.
3. You can’t relax and be yourself with certain people from your past.
4. You’re attracted to partners who treat you negatively.
5. You over-react, and find it hard to calm down.
6. You have poor boundaries, and always feel you’re being used.
7. You’re always making poor decisions, and repeating old mistakes.
disabled-hamlet
It’s not autism acceptance if you need to hear that it is autism in order to accept it.
Took me a minute to process what this says. But yes this, very much.
If something needs to be called The Right Word in order to tick your Internal Tolerance Box then it’s not acceptance it’s lip service.
I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17
It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.
All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.
I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.
Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.
I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.
When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.
Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.
They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".
There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.
Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.
Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"
The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.
The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur
There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".
Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.
^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.
Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.
You'd go into the ace positivity tags and you'd see shit like "Trump ace moodboard uwu" from exclusionists. You'd see it regularly with all kinds of filth like him: Trump, Thatcher, fucking Hitler.
You'd have blogs PROUDLY TOUTING their aphobia. Blogs had titles like "aphobicrosequartz" (who was a fucking mess and a half), You'd have big name blogs reblogging from known aphobes, and when people asked "hey, are you aphobic/an exclusionist," they'd be like "uwu I don't want to get involved in discourse" and like, the post below that ask is a reblog openly making fun of aces.
You know how "lgbtpn" was briefly a thing? Yeah, that's because aphobes used it to explicitly exclude aces, while trying to appease people and include pans and nbs.
There was graphic porn and gore regularly in ace related tags from aphobes. That's how fucking bad it was. Even now I don't venture into the asexual tag. It really was horrific, how aspecs were treated. And a lot of aphobes never stopped, they just became quiet about it and started saying "I don't wanna get involved in discourse" while they openly rb from aphobes and never reblog anything written ace stuff, even in multi sexuality queer posts.
Yeah the whole "i don't want to get involved in discourse" while having urls that are (if you know what to look for) explicitly aphobic and continuing to reblog aphobic jokes and from other aphobes
It really sucks to follow someone new and scout their blog for any hint of where they stand, how they feel about you, and often there isn't any hint, so you think it's safe and for a while it is! And then you get one of those jokes or shitty moodboards and realize what they think about you
It was a terrible time.
And most of it coming from people who really should have known better.
There were terfs who openly admitted that they got onto that bandwagon by way of aphobia, actually. It was the terf gateway drug, and was explicitly used as such. A recruitment tool. Real grim stuff.
I was on tumblr when this was going down and can verify. I didn't identify as being on the ace-spectrum at the time, not because of the harassment, but because I just hadn't put together I was demisexual yet, but HOO BOY did I see what was going on and spent plenty of time yelling into the wind for inclusion. Also, as someone who is demisexual, I have to say that any smaller/microlabel identities got so much shit for it the exact same way that microlabel non-binary genders and neopronouns did.
At the end of the day, I just started saying I was queer because honestly, it's nobody else's damn business what the specifics are.
And at the same time, I *am* demisexual in the same way that I'm a genderqueer gender-fluid non-binary femme, in the same way that I'm bi/pan/multi/whatever you want to call it romantic, so it's not that the specifics are gone. And they do matter.
Anyway, as critically important as it is to talk about this issue, I think it's equally important to do what we can to rebuild a strong community. Obviously the zeitgeist of the time has passed and recapturing that moment is unlikely. But we can and should try to build back new and better now.
“Spend your time with people who make you happy - not with people you have to impress.”
— Unknown