Asklemmy

Thanks. Yeah the friend might've also been asexual? He had one girlfriend in the entire time I knew him, but that didn't last very long. shrug The subject honestly never came up between us, it was just how it was and we had more interesting shit to do/talk about/etc with our time.

Re:puberty - yeah, my mom a couple times decided to ask me The Gay Question, like if you aren't bringing home girlfriends maybe you have boyfriends and are just shy about it or something? And I didn't have the words to explain (or really even understand myself) that I was into boys about as much as I was into girls: not at all. Like I went through some of the motions just because it was what everyone else was doing, but I never understood the point so it never worked out for long. Man, if only I had just been into boys instead, that would've been a massive relief. I'd have been parading that shit up and down the street in a pathetic attempt to get me some of that 'Look, I'm not broken; I may be a little weird but I'm just like you!' validation. :P

Yeah I’m definitely working on trying to get rid of the FOMO at this point in time. I have a lot of great people in my life tbh and I’m trying to branch out and be a bit more social with things that scare me. But even if I do, I’ll never really have the “standard” human experience. Gotta figure out how to eventually be ok with that.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Once I got out of the depression of my younger years I spent a lot of years I still had to distract myself constantly from that hollowness I felt inside at not having what everyone else had, that loneliness that threatened to overwhelm. I was good at it, and thus I was able to mostly be a nominally-functional adult most of the time. But it did fade, and I think a lot of that had to do with age. The older you get the more you just get used to the way things are, you become more comfortable and pragmatic about who you are, and you don't miss the things that you decided were less important nearly as much. I was rather surprised to discover a few years ago that it wasn't gone forever, though. I got a surprise dose when the friend I mentioned died; I had also lost both of my parents in the ~8 years before that, so with that third and most shocking death I pretty much went instantly from feeling like a reasonably well-adjusted person to rudderless and totally alone in the world. In the first week or two I couldn't not have some kind of live TV or radio on, it was like I had to know for sure that there were definitely still other people in the world right now living their lives just like they always had. I couldn't sit in a quiet room by myself without feeling it creeping up on me for like a year afterward. But it does get better.

I’m not a spiritual or religious person, myself. I briefly looked into Taoism, but it seems that the westernized idealized version of it isn’t what Taoism necessarily is in reality.

Yeah, fair enough. If I had to slap a label on my spirituality it'd be 'It's complicated.' :P I spent a lot of my life looking for meaning and religion seemed like simultaneously the best place to look but also the hardest place to find it in, it was frustrating and confusing as hell, so I spent a lot of time reading everything I could get my hands on about it, was an atheist for a long time because of that frustration, and... let's just say that nowadays I'm more of a homebrew kinda guy. ;)

Thanks for your offer to chat! Hope you don’t mind if I’m just giving a long winded response here lol.

Not at all, you might've noticed I'm a lil long-winded myself. :P

I found out about asexuality in my teens.

That must've been an interesting experience. We often don't realize how hard it is to think about and understand a thing until we have a name for it, it's like we need that convenient handle to grab onto to be able to figure it out, and I didn't have that until years and years later.

Even today, whenever I approach asexual communities, I find that most of them are filled with very young coming of age people who are so extremely “terminally online” to the point where it makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Maybe it's because I didn't discover these communities until I was in my 40s, but I felt that pretty keenly myself, so I think I know what you mean. Because they're young and sexuality is normally such a huge part of peoples' lives at that time it's hard to escape the constant reminders from all around them of the fact that they're different, so they seek community online/etc and then turn that community's group identity (identification with this particular way of being) into their own personal identity, they make themselves so much about this one aspect of their lives. Meanwhile I'm over here like 'Yeah, I'm asexual, but also I'm a former IT guy, a life-long gamer almost since the birth of video games, an avid student of politics, religion, and philosophy, a big sci-fi nerd', etc. I have a lot of stuff going on, that's just one small - and, these days, not even particularly significant - portion of my life, so the idea of people who are all about that is just weird to me.

But it’s refreshing to hear from your perspective, as an asexual in the “real world”, with thoughts, feelings, and experiences based more in reality as opposed to in an online hypersensitive safety zone.

I dunno that I am any more 'of the real world' than anyone else, lol. I'm disabled and spend a huge amount of my free time in front of a computer, so I'm as terminally online as anyone else. :P I just had to mostly figure a bunch of this stuff out on my own because it was going on before the internet was a thing.

Hope the best for you!

Thanks, you too!