Hi, I'm Shadaras (or Shade; or Cole I suppose, but that's often harder for folk to remember). White nb grayro? ace person (they/them), graduated from college a couple of years ago, currently seeing how long it'll take me to get a full-time job doing elementary education. (I have a couple part-time jobs right now...)
I'm on tumblr and Ao3 under the same username (shadaras), so you can find a bunch of my fandomy stuff there if you care. I also just like reading and writing and drawing in general.
I do a lot of tabletop gaming/LARPing, mostly with D&D/WoD. I live in a household that totals six people, and we're all friends who graduated from the same college, and we are all gamers, and most of us are some form of ace (all of us are some form of queer). It's delightful and the best thing.
Also, I have a cat; her name is Mar, she is small and black and the best.
re: your first topic -- that is very very much of my life. I keep having close friendships that aren't relationships but only aren't relationships because we say they aren't, not because they have any other distinguishing characteristic. (this is related to why I just say I'm grayro/ace, because /arg/ defining further is hard when most of your data points are wibbly to begin with.)
I would also love more support for figuring out how to name/categorize relationships that aren't /quite/ anything, but are definitely /something/. For me, those relationships are usually mutual, which is very helpful, but... it'd be nice if it didn't feel like close non-romantic intimacy wasn't an atypical thing (due to the lack of terminology). And that's not something specific to wlw as a community, I think, but I can certainly see how it comes up more often in this context.
like, I'm nb, but I id'd as a woman for a while, and I distinctly have a preference for dating women (and being attracted to women/femme-leaning androgynous people), and thus even if I'm slightly outside the space that is wlw, I'm so very adjacent. (I get read as a woman all the time, and don't bother correcting people unless they're friends or part of a community that otherwise knows better.)
(I also have always blatantly refused to identify as a lesbian despite my relationship history meaning that I present as one. queer is much better. this was true even before I id'd as nb; it just became easier to justify after I realised I was nb. and yet, with my friends, I will totally call myself 'gay' in the colloquial sense, because in my particular friendgroup, it's closer to a synonym for queer than for homo-oriented anyway? but only in my friendgroup would I allow that, really, because it's a known and trusted and safe space.)



Asexuality ImzyIntroduction ThreadSep 12, 2016 at 6:45 AM