As someone who has experienced child abuse (which ultimately led to acute paranoia and anxiety) first hand, I’m glad this video was made. More people need to be aware that how they treat their children can have a long lasting effect on their child’s health and mental and emotional stability.
This video is very helpful for anyone who suffered or is suffering from childhood abuse…
bringing this back today for the start of pride month. still overwhelmed by how well this comic went down and with how many people relate. it’s easy to think aro-ace people are all totally accepting of their identities and really proud of who they are. i guess on websites like this you see a lot of people proudly putting their identity in their bio, a flag in their profile picture.
in fact i think a lot of aro-ace people really hate that part of themselves, hide it, and struggle for a long time to ‘accept’ who they are and feel any sense of ‘pride’. that’s the feeling i wanted to capture here. the disappointment, the loneliness, upon realising that you can’t feel what is such a wonderful thing. the embarrassment of not being ‘normal’, of being some random sexuality that nobody irl has heard of, and letting down those around you because you can’t be who they want you to be. how desperately you want to change, how desperately you want to feel. but you just can’t.
i know not all aro-ace people feel like this. i know lots of aro and/or ace people feel able to be in relationships, to feel closeness and have partners in other ways. but i think it’s important to be aware that some aro-ace people do feel like this.
the comments on this comic have mostly been great but a few have been very frustrating. a comment it got a lot was along the lines of ‘aw!! you don’t need to have sex to be in a relationship!’. you completely missed the point, hah. this is not a comic about sex. it’s about a lack of feeling, the lack of something beautiful other people seem to have. another comment that popped up a few times was ‘maybe she’s a lesbian’. well maybe lesbians and aro/ace girls have more in common than people think – maybe they both often struggle to accept that they feel no attraction to men, even though society has conditioned them to do so, sometimes spending years trying to force themselves to like men in that way, when they just can’t.
this comic is called ‘wanting and not wanting at the same time’ because she wants to love. but when it comes down to the reality, she can’t fulfil the requirements of that. she wants to love someone forever, to get married and have children and grow old with her soulmate, but she doesn’t want it with this person. or that person. or anyone she meets or will ever meet. a sort of catch 22, i guess.
hope that makes sense. thanks for listening, and have a lovely pride month ❤️
“Down under (Australia) all is still and dark, the spirits of the Earth are sleeping. It is the Dreamtime. Dreamtime is a difficult concept for many of us to deal with as it is not a linear passage of time but rather an all-encompassing state of being, and so the Dreamtime is both past, present and future all at the same time.”—Ted Loukes … a primal reason Australia is a solar Capricorn is heeded with the powerful responsibility of conserving the umbilical cord and ancestral teachings held here… the oldest astrological artefacts have been found in the globe’s Solar Plexus
“Scientists think they may have found the world’s oldest astronomical map in Australia. The sacred Aboriginal site is believed to have been made to map the position of the sun, moon and stars in the sky. Genetic research has inferred a date of Indigenous habitation as old as 80,000 years (well before Greek culture formed 3-4,000 years ago). Therefore, their study of the stars is probably the oldest knowledge on earth, such that it remains an intriguing possibility that aboriginal star knowledge does contain some fragments of a much older original culture.
The Pleiades also figures in the Dreamings of several language groups. For example, in the central desert region, they are said to be seven sisters fleeing from the unwelcome attentions of a man represented by some of the stars in Orion. The close resemblance of this to Greek mythology is believed to be coincidental — there is no evidence of any cultural connection” – ABC Australia
