Pitri

ASCII alone already does offer a rather wide range of emotions, no need for unicode. :D

depends what you mean with “taboo”.

being a neo-nazi? generally heavily frowned upon. use certain nazi imagery and/or deny that the holocaust happened? both actually punishable by law.

taboo as in we don’t talk about it? hell no! we get taught about the cruelties that happened here at length in school above a certain age. let me tell you, history class in germany is not fun. in certain german states there’s also one mandatory(?) school trip to the remains of one of the nearest concentration camps. trust me, we know about the absolutely inhumane cruelty these monsters were capable of.

content warning for the rest of the post:

one of the images that stuck most with me was of a documentary shown in school. pictures of one of the gas chambers, where they shoved in by the hundreds. the concrete ceiling had fingernail imprints. the implications of that alone are haunting. they must have had absolutely agonizing last minutes in there.

…or some punishment cells in concentration camps. just tight gaps, enough to shove someone in sideways. and not tall enough to be able to stand upright in. the person inside could not get relief from standing up, they could not sit down. all they could do was exist in a painful position with the knees against one wall, the butt against the other wall, and gravity doing the rest to cause relentless pressure on the knees. as far as I know they got put in there for days, with eye witnesses describing constant screams of agony from inside.

…or the one time hitler decided to hang some people. but not with a regular rope, but rather on piano strings, with the victims being lowered very slowly into their final position. once hanging, there was no way for the victim to grab the string anymore. all they could do was flail around and slowly suffocate. it was just another sadistic way of maximizing pain, agony and despair in the people they hated and hunted.

and these are just a tiny fraction of the documented things. i don’t even want to imagine what atrocities without witnesses happened.

(edits for grammar)

Relationships? Which relationships?

I’m honestly half joking. The one relationship I ever entered as a teenager was because I was drowning in hetero- and amatonormativity and didn’t know any better. I never hugged her, I never kissed her, and I especially never did any naughty things with her. It was an attempt from my mother to encourage me to feel love as an otherwise friend-less neurodivergent child. you know, the kind of “why don’t you write a love letter to her, if you enjoy being around her?” encouragement. It was only platonic, but I didn’t know better. I’m sure my mother meant well, but in hindsight it is disgusting how much it actually was amatonormative coercion.

Other than that, as an aroace, I never entered a romantic or sexual relationship.

I did find some amazing online friends for life, though. We’ve been meeting for a full week once a year, for the last decade, and always have a blast. Funnily enough, at least 4 people in the friend group turned out to be queer… :D

And friendships is where I excel at, I’d say. I’d consider myself a very loyal friend.

What does hurt a bit is the obvious priority shift when people start putting their long term relationship to the next level, which usually massively decreases the time and effort they put into their friend groups. The fact that they suddenly have something better to do than do stuff with friends, or only rarely show up, because their significant other(s) are more important does feel more and more isolating over time.

I think it was 2014 or 2015 where someone suggested to me that I might be aro. either I misheard it or they mispronounced it, but I thought “what? aromatic? what’s that supposed to mean?” and kinda dismissed it.

a bit later, maybe also 2016, I stumbled upon the term asexuality. and I found myself in there as well. to me, it was less “omg, I’m not broken!” but more “ah, that’s the word for it”. I was already kind of aware of my non-existant level of attraction and desire to look for a relationship. I’m sex repulsed, so that made asexuality rather clear.

in terms of being aromantic: I never kissed, hugged or cuddled with the teenage girlfriend I had (into which relationship my mother kinda coerced me into. not out of bad faith, though. I had almost no friends, and she just wanted me to encourage to feel romantic love toward someone and experience how awesome it’s supposed to feel)

so, some years later, I also stumbled upon the aro label. even though I knew it was applicable, I didn’t really vibe with it for quite some time. maybe because I my sex repulsion made my asexuality a lot clearer and significant than my (I guess) romance indifference.

Today, I’ve embraced both labels. I’m glad to have found them, because it opened up a world for me to find other like-minded people online (I’m not aware of anyone offline being aro or ace) to share discussions and memes with.

the a-spec community is/was one of the last things I regularly returned to reddit for, if this community finally picks up some steam, I might be able to stay here for good. :)

one lesson life gave me was:

no matter how fundamentally and universally hated you think something is, there’s always some individuals, communities and/or cultures who enjoy said thing.

the same opposition goes for things you assume everyone loves.

it’s amazing how incredibly complex and diverse humans are.

German here.

hottest: 42°C in summer 2003. there have probably been warmer days by now, but I’m not aware of any.

coldest: -14°C in winter 2009/2010, while waiting for an absolute asshole of a bus driver to stop reading his news paper and finally open the door to let us in. I get that you want to enjoy your break in silence, but ffs. Leaving us waiting in such cold temperatures for around 10 minutes was just inhumane.

If you’re respectful to others, you’re good.

Generally, I’m really careful about forming an opinion about people without knowing more about them. Each person deserves to be judged by their individual character and actions, not by the group they belong to.

who doesn’t want to be 100% a man or 100% a woman.

I’d go further and avoid any kind of “want to be” wording in explanations to people who can be really doubtful. Gender is who you are, not who you want to be. If you tell them “I want to be <other gender>”, they might form some kind of “attack helicopter” opinion/joke. but if you tell them “I’m <gender> on the inside” or “despite my body, I’m actually <gender>”, that leaves a lot less room for wrong interpretations.

“Someone who’s gender identity neither aligns completely with man or woman” would be my rewording, in this case.

yeah, I’ve seen the argument. people cry out because testosterone is (deservedly) considered essential for ftm trans people, while in most sports, it would be considered doping for cis people.

while I can see why people feel like it’s unfair treatment, they usually have no idea about the trans experience. excluding trans people from the opportunity to have a sports carreer would in any case be a lot more unfair than some selectively allowed hormones for athletes.

no need to feel like an impostor. you could be homoromantic asexual. or if you’re also on the aro spectrum, oriented aroace (where tertiary attractions are relevant enough to be considered part of their orientation) could apply.

even if you’re not on the end of the ace spectrum, like gray or demisexual, you still belong in this community. and if you ever turn out to be not aspec anymore in the future, i’m sure you’d still be welcome here.

you are what you are, and that’s valid. you don’t need to prove your place here.

and feeling lonely/sad because you don’t have anyone is no reason to be excluded, either. some aces (and aros) have no problem being alone. some crave a relationship of some kind. some are actively avoiding it, because “ew, relationships”.

the ace spectrum is just as diverse as humanity itself, we just have the little difference of not (or conditionally, or rarely) experiencing sexual attraction. that says NOTHING about our opinions or how we interface with the (lack of) feelings

I tried to do my part and heavily restricted my visits to the site. I checked the state of my feed and user profiles a select few times but always left almost immediately.

I even redirected my reddit browser bookmark to a local website which acted as a warning wall, just to stop me from my subconsciously opening and browsing the site.