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text | timaeusTestified | Coming Out

CWs for entire post/threads within: Discussion of sexual orientation, queerness, discrimination against LGBTQ+, homophobia, transphobia, gender identity, themes of coming out etc.

Coming out is such a fuckin' scam.

There's always someone who has to hear this but damn, don't let anyone guilt you into that shit. You don't have to explain any part of your identity to anyone. Not your friends, not your family, not your significant other. Fuckin' nobody. It's your identity. Yours. Not theirs.

And for the record? Don't sweat it so much if you can't figure it out. Sexuality and romantic attraction and gender identity don't need to be forced into some convenient description you found online. It's fine if you haven't found the right word for it. Language is, oftentimes, limiting to the full expression of our existence.

That shit is so fluid most people be wasting their whole life feeling worried about it because everyone around them goes on and on about how they figured their shit out. Like cool, whatever, congrats for them, but trust me, you're not less valid or whatever just because you ain't got a flag to hang yet. It's fine if you never figure it out. It doesn't have to be a bad thing.

It's okay to be confused for a long time and it's fine to want to figure out how to fix that, but like, seriously, a lot of that confusion does come from comparing yourself to other people and their own experiences.

Whatever. I'm making this whole post private in case anyone has questions or would like to talk.

Consider this April's sex education lesson. I'm simplifying things, obviously, but the point is to open the discussion. So. Discussion Opened.

Rules of Engagement:

1. You don't get to ask me who else is responding to this post or what they are saying. I will shove my foot so far up your ass all you'll taste for the rest of your life will be dirt.

2. You are allowed to ask me about my own shit, but I'm allowed to decline to answer if I get a weird vibe from you.

3. Feel free to go anonymous. I won't pry.

4. Do not force yourself to discuss things you are not ready to discuss. I'm not going to beg you for dirty deetz so if you're not ready, then maybe tab the conversation for later.

5. Judgement-free zone. I have been on every sketchy part of the web and am completely desensitized. Imagine a thousand-yard stare but instead of war-torn countrysides, I'm just seeing thousands of years' worth of explicit Sonic x Knuckles fanart. Which, okay, actually, dope ship. Bad example. But you get my meaning.

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[ opens mouth

closes mouth ]

I don't mean to be dismissive and rude, I don't fully grasp the whole situation that brought this on.

But is this something very important in this place, too? [ "too" because Kaneki knows it's an issue many would talk about back in his world. However, ever since he was turned into a cannibal monster he kind of... stopped thinking about anything related to relationships.

But Ken expected in a world where most things want to kill you and your blood causes corruption and you can turn into a beast, this would not be a topic most would stress about ]

I'm coming out here to make it clear.
Some kid out there said I was fucking repressed because I keep keep making comments about peoples dicks.
I just want it on the record that the only thing I'm repressing is the urge to punch him in the face.
Because he was fucking twelve and apparently people look down on you when you do that shit.
Their insults, kids.
They don't fucking mean shit.
You'll learn that when you grow a pair.

Oh, shit. Mac, is that you?

the hedgehog?

[Completely, thoroughly, entirely missing the point right here.]

while i 100% agree that yeah, you shouldn't feel pressured to come out or whatever, it's not exactly like. easy? to not? i dunno weren't you raised in isolation?

that said, god i wish someone had told me not to worry about fucking labels so much. you have no idea how much teenage!me would have appreciated it, because it feels like literally everyone had words for everything and while i LIKE words it just made things more confusing sometimes.

when were you looking at sonic x knuckles was it regular or sanic x do you know de way?

It's... odd.

I feel like I've been spiraling about my own identity ever since I decided to examine it thoroughly. Like somehow, observing it only made it worsen. As if I opened a catbox to give the kitten inside food and discovered that it'd died instead.

I'm not a girl, not exactly. I'm too broken to be a woman; not emotionally, but physically. It was decided that I had to be a girl when I was just a few months old, and learning that I could've been something, someone else, avoided so much misery and confusion and hatred over my body... it shattered a part of me, I think, even though there's a flare of hope whenever I see myself in a skirt or a dress or what have you. When I can bring myself to look at a mirror, that is, before I notice every part of me that's wrong.

But I'm not a boy, either. I tried, before I even knew the truth about my body. While there was some satisfaction in escaping my own crumbling expectations about what I was supposed to become, it also made me miserable. Like I was even more of an impostor in my own skin. My soul never fit quite right but that only made it worse.

And thinking of myself as in between those two is what makes me feel most awful. That I'm not girl or boy, that I'm just some sexless neuter, that I'm furniture like what I told myself for years. When I tried to be a boy, I felt secure in how it made me despair, and even when I fail at being a girl I can grasp at some comfort in the shards, but putting myself between those two extremes feels as if I'm crushing what humanity I have left. I know that there are other people who find comfort in that in between or neither or away from gender, but it just makes me feel hollow.

No matter where I turn, there's always something that fits wrong, one way or another, and I don't know what to do. I started taking hormone "replacement" (not that there's much to replace) a few months ago and I feel like it hasn't done anything beside making my skin softer, which makes me feel like there's something just fundamentally broken with me that refuses to let me find any peace.

Sorry

I know the whole point of this post that I didn't have to have it figured out but I just

Needed to get these thoughts down somewhere

I don't know what to do

Edited 2022-04-19 22:51 (UTC)

[ Gideon, who has never heard of 'coming out' before, finds this whole post kind of confusing, which means she doesn't pay much attention to it.

Except for that last bit. ]

whats sonic x knuckles

idk if i'm all the way a girl anymore.
haven't had time to think about it a lot bc i want my partner to be the first person i talk to about it for real but it was a weird thought i had and now i can't get it out of my head.

sonadow > sonuckles live with the truth

that having been said, yeah, coming out is pretty rough stuff for some people. I didn't really go through that kind of stuff to its fullest extent since I kinda took on a separate life from my parents pretty early, and I've never cared what anyone else thought

but it's not easy.
my weirdest thoughts have always kind of been
if i were a beautiful girl would guys notice me more?
i don't want to be, mind. but the two guys i've liked the most in my lifetime...yeah. there's always been a girl who's more pretty and strong and this and that in the way. nicer, too. i was never the nicest person to them.

anyway they're not here, so nbd. i'm pretty comfortable being gay. my support goes out there for anyone else.

Apparently I was out before. I mean, another version of me was out. I wasn't out. I'm not--

[ well he's just fucked himself, hasn't he. Is there a delete button? ]

[ There's just an image. K's showing his support for Dirk living his best robosexual life! ]

[This is all extremely on the nose for Min-Gi. He feels so called out, in fact, that he scrolled past and back several times before actually reading the whole thing and then spent an even longer time thinking about the contents.

But, finally, and this is after telling himself not to engage several times:]

I wish I knew someone like you back home.

Thanks for being who you are.

[So, since Equius was about as comfortable talking about his sexuality as he was staring at a bucket, and Vira-Lorr was currently busy abducting her girlfriend to protect her from those naughty butterflies, guess who he got?]

Hell yeah.
You know, if there's one thing I do miss about Remnant?
They really never thought too much about this kind of thing.

Shitty place in pretty much every other way.
But love whoever you want, however you want, and be yourself.

[ Is there a point in dishing this out to someone who is probably a third of his age? No, not really, but sometimes it's nice to get things off of your chest. Even during his extensive therapy he was always pretty quiet about this one thing, tiptoeing around the edges of it and trying to tackle it piece by piece in a way that allowed him to avoid naming the problem.

If he couldn't be anonymous, he still wouldn't say anything. But he can. ]

When I was a young lad in the army, I had this friend. He looked like the poster boy for all-American masculinity. He was strong, brave, and very...dutiful.
I'd have followed him to the ends of the Earth.

We never labeled what we had. I knew he wouldn't accept it, so I never tried. I'm not even sure we 'had' anything, so many of those years are a blur to me now.
If I ever got too close he'd up and vanish.
But he'd always come back and I'd always take him.
I don't think I ever got any further than 'coping' in regards to dealing with his absence.

I wonder what we might have had in a different time or place.
Or if I'd had the balls to risk saying something that may have pushed him away for good.

Is Sonic and Knuckles in the same universe as the pure pony, Fluttershy, you talk about?

I know what I like, but I also know what my responsibility is. A potential individual who would normally represent my responsibility has arrived, but she's not like the ones I knew. Should I just kill her?

[It was private. Dirk could just laugh at him, and he wouldn't care. Was it weird to be participating in this? Probably.]

[Well... this is a lot. She's always approached this topic with a certain amount of shame. It's not the most thoroughly disgusting part of herself, probably. Not in her own book, anyway, but it's still something else that she always felt was... wrong with her.

She has no idea what to say to all this. But it does get her thinking.]

This is another thing you should probably be happy you missed about the old world, man.

But yeah. It's bullshit and it makes no sense. Sexuality is so fucking dumb. Being real for a second, I think it's less that I'm not sure about myself and more that other people being unsure got in my head and I started I guess just faking like I understood what the fuck they were on about?

There was this one girl I was super into. [Understatement. She forced the girl in question to kill her, to finally kiss her back. They're just the same thing when you're as thoroughly rotten inside as Faith is.] I thought she liked me back, and I thought we kinda had something I guess? Like, we went to prom together, we hung out every other night, we were the only two people like us left in the world. But I found out that the entire time I knew her she was secretly hiding her serial killer ex boyfriend from all her friends.

I think we did have something, in the end, she just didn't want to admit to it, 'cuz she was so fixated on just being a normal girl next door despite all the shit we both did. And I guess she thought that I was something to be ashamed of, and he was something to base her whole life around.

I don't know what I am?? All the girls I screwed back home seemed to think it was like a fun taboo to explore, or an experiment, or they were just being rebellious and saw me as an outlet. I fuck guys and it's just kinda disappointing, most of the time. And every time they want anything more I just bolt. I don't really do relationships in general, I'm not someone who should be in a relationship, but I've never really wanted it from any of the guys I've screwed.

So I guess I'm like... a little gay? Idk. Maybe a quarter or something.

[She is, in fact, fully gay.]

[What first draws his eye is the unique color of the text. Clearly, timaeusTestified is a person of culture. There are few sophisticated enough to appreciate orange in all its bold glory. Naruto has found a kindred spirit.

But then he reads the message. And rereads it. He’s no closer to understanding it the fourth time than the first. And though Naruto is more than capable of willful ignorance, his confusion is earnest. Sexuality? Gender identity? Dirty deetz? Honestly, it’s like reading a foreign language. His own sex education had largely come in the form of reviewing Jiraiya’s trashy cishet erotica; suffice to say, that sex education has done Naruto no favors.]

i don’t get it

[Despite some embarrassment over the general topic of sex, he doesn’t go anonymous. It’s just not his style.]

these words don’t exist in my dimension
what are you talking about?

[all of this makes so little sense to Rose that it might as well be written in Sanskrit]

I don't understand a single word you said. And why are you texting in orange?

The good thing about this place is that you don't have to feel so pressed to have some kind of "normal" because people come from all over the multiverse! If there was one thing at least seemed to be not so taboo, it was queer relationships! People were just IN them, and there wasn't this lingering question about it!

Sort of wish the real world was like that. The idea to have to appear "normal" just seems to do damage to queer kids and makes us feel like we have to hide ourselves all the time.

Advice for an immortal of the "very hard to kill and aging glacially" variety on how to contend with age gaps? I'm turning fifty in November (I think; someone deliberately withheld the month and date from me), but my physiology and the mirror date me at my mid-thirties.

There's someone I'm interested in who's in their mid-twenties (admittedly, I have a bias toward a younger partner, the better to prolong the lifespan of the relationship), but there seems to be some public disdain for age gaps, perceived or otherwise. In the long term, I'm concerned the age gap could start going the other way (ie. they grow older in chronology and appearance and my appearance remains relatively unchanged), which is bound to lead to some unwarranted attention from the ignorant. My instinct is to knock the interloper into the next room for being a judgemental knob, but that's socially inappropriate and I suspect the one who holds my interest would have words for me. Thoughts? (As well as any general sage advice on handling immortality and social relations.)

[Then again, the Social Darwinism in his programming might have been a deliberate preventative measure against his and his nominal siblings growing too socially attached to others, especially the unaltered humans they'd been intended to dominate.]

[sansa has politely chosen to ignore all references to sex and sexuality, as it doesn't concern her and she has nothing to say about them. she doesn't seem to be aware that they are almost entirely what this post is about.]

I do want to tell everyone who I am, and fly our banners, but the false name is a barrier between myself and those who wish me harm, and I am loath to be rid of any sort of protection, though I know I can do without it. And once I have told everyone, I can no longer pass unnoticed, I will forever be the girl who lied about her name, no matter that I had every reason to do so, especially before I came here. And they will know me for a fugitive, though I am innocent of that crime, and think me very tragic. I liked being a girl who had no one to mourn, and nothing to fear. But I feel it is the best way I know to honor those I have lost, and this name was given to me by the man who may have gotten them all killed, in the end. I like my true name much better.

Edited 2022-04-22 01:41 (UTC)

you're nicer than I am.
I try to stay things that aren't my business and that especially includes the intimate details of someone's life.

Some of the people here might need this so at least someone is willing to do it.
I'm not that one, but I also don't judge.

Better get your armchair handy.

[ Triple-checking this is anon before sending!! ]

This might be a little off topic but I'm not sure who else to ask. I think maybe I did something weird and I'm pretty sure you're going to say it's not weird but please try to, I don't know
understand this from the point of view of people who only talk about this stuff sometimes.
My friend told me they didn't know how to use protection, and since I've seen a video, I offered to show them.
Wait no not like that, I mean I just used an eggplant!!
It's not too weird, right? I didn't want to make it weird. Well they kind of made it weird. But that's fine. I think they found it funny.
I want them to be safe. I just don't know if maybe it was rude of me. Sorry, they don't really teach us how to talk about this stuff.

What does it mean to 'come out?' You must forgive my ignorance. I have never heard such a term, and I hope you might help me understand what it means.

Considering that topics of sex and sexuality are still not talked about where I am from, it strikes me as odd how open you are with it.
Not odd, I suppose, but more surreal.
I don't think society as a whole is comfortable with discussing such, but I can see where it would be quite personal.
I'm still figuring this all out myself, after all - I suppose I haven't "come out".
If you don't mind me asking, how did you become so comfortable talking about these subjects?

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@samsa, text

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