After being confused about my identity and sexuality for a long time, I’ve landed on the label of queer. I’m queer in EVERY sense, in terms of gender, sexuality, overall demeanor, etc. I experience the world in only a way that I can as a neurodivergent poc, and this definitely impacts my choice to label myself as simply queer. It’s a lot easier to boil down all my experiences and feelings into that one word rather than thoroughly explain my relationship to womanhood, manhood, sex, and romance and explain where I fall on the nonbinary and aroace spectrums and why. 

Specifically, with sex and romance, it’s easier to identify as queer instead of explaining to people that I almost never experience romantic or sexual attraction or even arousal. It took me an actually embarrassing amount of time to realize that when people describe what they want to do to someone else’s body or how they want to prioritize a person in their life in a different way from their friends, they’re serious. It’s not just hyperbole or a joke. To me, sex is an activity you can choose to do with anyone and a relationship is comparable to a very close friendship. To many others though, both are much different than that. 

Sex, and even romance to an extent, have always been shown as human needs. Our society focuses HEAVILY on sex and even romance, or rather, relationships with a romantic label. It seems that your status or your level of success/happiness in life is determined by how much sex you have or whether or not you’re in a relationship. In shows, I see so many jokes about how a character is acting a certain way because they haven’t been laid in a while. At times, a person’s value also seems to correlate to how “fuckable” they are or whether or not they seem like romantic partner material (this arbitrarily assigned value directly relates to societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy and ableism).  

The idea that having sex is a fulfillment of a base, human need, and something inherently human is awkward for me to grapple with as someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction or even like, sexual arousal the majority of the time. I’m still human even if I don’t experience those desires in the way that everyone else does, aren’t I? I think the strict definitions that people operate under when discussing sex and romance are extremely rigid and eliminate people like me, who don’t experience sexual and romantic attraction in a way that fits within our neurotypical, heteronormative society. These definitions are heavily predicated on the belief that sex and romantic relationships are between one able-bodied cis man and one abled-bodied cis woman. For a long time, these definitions also depended on the idea that only white people were falling in love and procreating correctly.

Within the queer community, there is a lot of division when it comes to definitions regarding sexuality and gender as well. Online, there’s a lot of senseless discourse where people try to force labels onto those who choose not to be labeled or choose to identify a certain way. Again, this is all in an effort to define sex and relationships. I can understand wanting to make sense of identities and anchor yourself when confronted with so many possibilities of existence and sex and love. However, it’s all incredibly community-breaking and only recreates the experience of alienation we already experience as queer people in mainstream society.

Living by what is most authentic to you and allowing others this same right is crucial. Ultimately, I think abandoning definitions and embracing a more personal view of sex and romance has been incredibly helpful for me and I think it would helpful for others too.

I think that if I had seen people like me– brown neurodivergent individuals– I wouldn’t be having such a hard time writing this. I tried writing about my experiences as a neurodivergent person, but I sounded like a poser when I read it back to myself. Like someone who’s trying too hard for attention. I tried listing out some of the experiences I have had as a neurodivergent person before backspacing almost immediately, I tried writing about how I have to watch and wait when I enter any social setting to learn how I should be behaving and talking. About how there have been so many instances in my life where I have miscalculated and said/done the wrong thing when I was so sure that that was the expected response. About how, for the longest time, I had a running list of rules in my head, all of them pertaining to social interactions. Little scripts for me to follow in any possible conversation or confrontation. 

 But, even now, listing all of that out makes me think that I’ve lived the life of the average individual. There’s nothing actually significant about any of what I’ve listed. A part of me KNOWS that this isn’t true, based on accounts from other neurodivergent individuals who have said the same thing. But, a bigger part of me is actually kind of nervous to post this. I know that I’m neurodivergent, but am I really? If someone asked me to demonstrate the ways that I am, I don’t know that I could. Or at least, that I could in a way that would really prove to them who I am. 

I think it’s hard for me to really believe that I am neurodivergent. Unfortunately, at this time, I don’t have the resources to pursue a diagnosis. A diagnosis that would be an incredibly grueling process for me, someone who is afab and a person of color. If I had known earlier on that someone like me could be neurodivergent, I don’t think all these doubts about my own validity would be swimming in my mind.

I HATEEEEE to admit this but the day we talked about how much time goes into labor and preparing for labor, I just about cried in class. My eyes welled up with fat tears hearing the hours and hours and hours and HOURS of my life that were being wasted on school and work and preparing for school and work. 

And it felt stupid that I was crying about it. I had been working since high school so it’s not like I hadn’t ever known or internalized this information. But, seeing all the hours calculated on the board intensified the feeling I always keep tucked away in my chest: I’m running out of time. My life is being spent in school and at work, instead of doing things that I actually enjoy. Instead of drawing and spending time with my loved ones, I’m putting my mind and body through hell for things that don’t even bring me joy or even satisfaction. 

And we’re EXPECTED to do this. Expected to sacrifice our personal lives, our precious time with ourselves and our loved ones, for work and school. Because if we really cared about becoming successful in life, we would choose to make that sacrifice. I remember receiving a text in the group chat of colleagues I was added to when I started my new job. The text talked about how it was our responsibility as new employees to sacrifice our holidays and free time to work so that the senior coworkers could finally enjoy the holidays they had missed out on during all these years and years of service. 

And for a lot of us, we HAVE to make that sacrifice play, whether it’s to make rent or to have enough to eat. Our bodies aren’t anything but tools for our employers to use until they’re unusable and unprofitable. And we HAVE to live this way if we want to survive and thrive in the current world we live in. 

All of that really hit me all at once during that class discussion, all of these thoughts collected in the tears that were ridiculously close to spilling. 

I think this is one of the reasons why it’s important to appreciate the time we spend with loved ones, ourselves included. Because those moments become a rarity as you grow up and have your time eaten by capitalism. Because those moments are what remind you that you are a PERSON, not just a tool.

They’re always with me. When I laugh, when I cry, when I scream. To Everyone, it’s less that they are my friend who accompanies me and more that they are me. It feels like we’re twins who get mistaken for each other even though we’re not even identical; we’re fraternal. And Everyone is upset with me when they feel like I’m not treating my body like I should. Because she’s a girl’s body. And a girl’s body should not be as hairy as I keep my body. A girl’s body should not move as sporadically and recklessly as I move my body. A girl’s body should not wear the clothes and sport the haircuts that I have my body wear and sport. And yet, my body is still too much of a girl’s body to be anything else. A girl’s body is not my body but somehow a girl’s body is all my body could ever be. It doesn’t make sense.  

It took a long time for it to sink in that Everyone thought I was being a bad friend to my body. I was being a bad friend by letting my body eat whatever they wanted, by letting their hair grow the way they wanted, by letting them move in the way that they wanted. 

I’m not a bad friend. I take care of them, in the best way that I know how, in ways that nobody else knows how to.  Even if my body was exactly like how Everyone wanted them to be, they would still never be happy with me or my body. Because no matter what, Everyone is only ever going to stare through my clothes and ogle our shape, categorize the color of our skin and decide who we are, pity the scarf on our head, and then pity us. Everyone is not going to care about anything that cannot be stripped off us with their eyes and placed into a box.

That’s why I stay good friends with my body. To keep us standing and happy.