SAD, Aromanticism, and hating JS

11/4/2022 1:54 AM

Howdy!

I'm excited to start up this blog. It's been quite a while since I've kept a journal of any kind, so I figured this could be fun and cathartic. I've recently deleted Twitter (not just the app, but all of my accounts) so I'm at a bit of a loss for voids to shout into.

I'm in a weird place right now. It's getting colder and darker out, which unfortunately means I've gotta reckon with my SAD. Awesome and incredibly apt acronym. It took me a good long while to figure out that I even had SAD. When all of your peers are super into autumn and comfy clothes and such, I figured I was just supposed to like the cold months, and that my changing moods had nothing to do with them. I'm supposed to be a weird kid who loves the night and Halloween, damnit, not some normie chump who loves Summer. But I can't help it! The cold and dwindling daylight really and truly makes me miserable. At least I know I have SAD now. I don't know how much that knowledge really helps me, but I have to believe it does for my own sanity. And, ya know, despite the dark making me depressed, I sure have been sleeping all day and coding/drawing/writing all night. I really wanna fix this, but its so hard to get my sleep schedule back on track. It's gotta happen at some point though.

I've (semi) recently discovered I'm aromantic too, which has been interesting. I've mostly come to terms with that whole facet of my identity. It's not like the idea of not experiencing romantic attraction itself is distressing, I don't really give a shit if I get no bitches. The problem is I now have to recontextualize my relationship with pretty much everything. It's pretty exhausting. Besides the obvious constraints of living under amatonormativity (if you're unfamiliar with the term or just wanna heard more about it, I highly recommend this video.) I've been tossing around something my therapist said to me in my brain for the past couple days. I told her that I might've experienced romantic attraction in the past, but I wasn't sure. She said to me that it seems like I just tend to get very intensely obsessed with people for a short amount of time, and that because of what I've been told all my life about romantic attraction, I had just assumed that was what it was. I'm paraphrasing, but that shit kinda rocked my world. She implied that I basically hyperfixate on people for short bursts. When I look back on my previous relationships, it makes a ton of sense. Every time I'd been approached by someone I liked romantically, I get really excited about it for a couple days, but it fades out incredibly quickly when the reality hits that the other person is attracted to me in a way that I couldn't for the life of me reciprocate, I clam up. I read somewhere, when I was first exploring the idea of being aromantic, that many aro people share the experience of enjoying a relationship for a little while but becoming incredibly uncomfortable when things get serious. When I thought about that in the context of my most recent relationship, something really clicked. Really, this is all to say that I'm in the throes of another "person hyperfixation" and I don't quite know what to do with myself. I guess all I can do is wait it out.

I was talking to my friend earlier today (or, yesterday I guess. It's past midnight now.) about all this. Thank you, by the way, if you're reading this. It was very helpful. Anyways, I realized that what I really want whenever I'm experiencing this obsessive feeling is knowledge. I want to know this person, "study" them, understand everything they'll let me know. It makes me feel like a fucking creep. But it also feels liberating to finally put some pieces together in my endless quest to decode my brain. Every day I'm amazed it took 19 years for anyone to realize I am autistic.

What I've been doing in the meantime of all this nighttime pondering is coding. I'm not particularly good at it, and JavaScript makes me want to burn cities down, but I need to figure out how to make a lightbox gallery that looks and behaves exactly how I want. Since deleting Twitter, I don't have anywhere to post my NSFW art. Aside from my server, of course. Shoutout to my friends in Sillyzone Ultra who have to watch me draw the same fictional woman's dick over and over again. My plan is to have a gallery on this site for my NSFW art. Who knew that making a lightbox gallery would be the most difficult thing in the whole damn universe. All this so people can see some tits. It'll be worth it though, I think. I've learned a lot these past few days. I will get there for sure. Probably.

This does unfortunately mean that development of the Toybox page has halted. Considering how far I've gotten on my other pages, though, I'm really not that bothered. I'm pretty damn proud of this site despite using mostly templates. I've been through quite a few ups and downs while developing all this, but I think it's paying off, for me at least.

That's all for now, I think. Future blog entries will for sure be more focused than this, but it has to start somewhere, huh? If I don't start off with a bit of a stinker then I won't start anywhere at all.

Seeya!