Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

In Which I Date Myself ;)

December 8, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’ve always been prone to inertia, for better and worse—often worse, especially this past month. This afternoon, I lay down, prone, on my bedroom floor with the intent of stretching my back … and then I stayed there. After some amount of time, I broke through enough to prop myself up on my elbows and—what else—scroll social media in hopes of finding a bit of, well, hope.

I’ve come across this one before—especially this past month: Queer kids need stories about happy queer adults.

A post from Midwestern Lesbian reads, "Queer kids need stories about happy queer adults." It is in observations of national honor our LGBTQ+ elders day.

(I should note here that I am incredibly lucky to have come from an extended family that included queer adults being happy and embraced, and of all the things I questioned, the love and acceptance of my parents was never one of them.)

By high school, I knew I wasn’t straight. I’d claimed a few middle school crushes in the form of naming boys I liked hanging out with, tried to stoke that into something that felt special, but it didn’t happen. Okay, I figured; if I don’t like boys any better than girls, I must be bi—duh. I joined GLOW—Gay-Lesbian-Or-Whatever—after school. (The only GLOW initiative I recall was a post-Katrina clothing drive. “But,” more than one person said, “that was months ago. Isn’t it over?”) I had pins on my backpack, “Marriage=<3+<3” and “These colors don’t run … the world” and that sort of thing. My best friend and I skipped school on election day to volunteer at the polls. I fooled around with a boy at writer camp and a girl in the back of a car, and I reassured myself that I was only 14/15/16—it would be statistically ridiculous to think I’d meet the love of my life so early. I was too busy worrying about bird flu anyway.

(“It feels like you’re not attracted to me,” a partner would later comment, and I guess they were on to something.)

I was 17, I think, when I started to accept that well, maybe there was more going on. My writing should have been a red flag; after a number of indulgent friends read drafts and commented on the seeming setup of romantic tension that never paid off, I found myself needing more clarification than a hormone-addled adolescent ought to.

“But,” I said more than once, “aren’t they friends?”

Eyebrows were raised; acknowledgments were made that I was the writer and they weren’t going to tell me how to write my story. It was just feedback, take it or leave it.

I left a note in my best friend’s locker asking what she thought, and she passed me a doodle of the “friends” in question.

“Wanna bone?” one (though I don’t remember which) asked.

“Let’s go,” the other replied.

It didn’t really feel like an orientation, or an identity, or, if I’m being honest, anything except a shortcoming. A supposedly beautiful, life-changing, mind-blowing part of the human experience was off-limits to me. Instead, I romanticized settling down in a small cottage on a rocky coast, just me and a big grey dog and a pair of horses and a vintage typewriter for when I wanted to feel fancy. If I was destined for spinsterhood, I would spin the hell out of it.

I accustomed myself to the idea that I would never be a significant other—a friend, sure, and maybe even a good friend, but my transition into adulthood had been shaped by watching my closest friends partner off and become less close. I understood the eventual progression of everyone around me as they moved onward and outward into Normal Grownup Relationships.

(I know this is sounding like the story of a queer adult being unhappy; just bear with me.)

I made a friend at work; we’ll call them Alex. After a relationship ended, Alex moved in with me, because that’s how I got most of my roommates—they were in a bad place without a better option. That’s the same reason Alex’s younger brother came to stay with us, first for the summer to get a break from their alcoholic mother, and then for longer. I didn’t consider myself the parental type, but I also don’t have a word for what I became: an adult who cared deeply for him and enjoyed the person he was becoming and felt genuinely privileged to be a part of that becoming.

Alex started dating a woman who lived several states away; let’s call her Linda. I thought I would be prepared for the inevitable, that when they moved in together, those several states away, I would be sad in the usual way. Instead it felt like I was losing a family I had never considered I might have.

(I know, I know. I promise, we’re almost to the good part.)

Here’s the thing: Linda never wanted kids. Alex’s brother was non-negotiable. Not wanting kids, or else already having one, is often still viewed by society at large as a deficit, a shortcoming, or whatever—a burden for a partner to bear or a reason to end the relationship. This could be a story of three queer adults realizing that what they bring isn’t, by some measure, “enough,” and going through the stages of grief that become so familiar it’s almost a habit.

Instead, last year, we pooled our resources and bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the queer-friendly state of New Jersey.

Our wifi network is called “NotAThrouple,” because that’s the obvious non-traditional model for people to latch onto, but it’s not accurate. We fill different roles in the home, and the same way it’s overly simplistic to ask a gay couple, “So which of you is the guy in the relationship?” it’s not easy to give names to who we are to each other. Alex and Linda are each other’s “significant other” in the most traditional sense—but I’m also significant, in a way I never thought I would be, not as an afterthought or a third wheel or a tag-along but as a weird-shaped piece of a weird-shaped family.

I won’t be so bold as to say, unequivocally, that it gets better, because sometimes it doesn’t. Some queer adults aren’t happy. Some adults are queer kids who got cut off or beaten down or smothered. Some queer kids never make it to adulthood.

But sometimes—even when a lot of things really, really suck—we’re happy.

The Emperor’s New Romance: An Aroace Writes Normative

June 15, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A disclaimer: This post brushes up against some big topics under the umbrella of LGBTQ+ concerns, and I am not going to do anything resembling justice to those topics. Good resources are out there if you’re looking to expand your appreciation for experiences outside the heteronormative; this post is not one of them.

Here are three things you should know about me before we go any further:
1. I love bad puns.
2. I am not a skilled archer.
3. But I am an aroace.

I grapple sometimes with the sense that I am defined less by my shape than by the negative space around me. I’m not a thing; I am an a-thing: an atheist, mildly anarchic, too apathetic to do much about it. And, in this month of Pride, an aromantic asexual.

Like bad puns, bad writing transcends gender, age, religion, political affiliation, race, and every other boundary we use to try to define our unique human shapes. Still, a corner of the internet has evolved to celebrate one overlap in the Venn diagram of poor prose: men writing women. Sometimes humorous, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes calling into question the US educational system, but always betraying some fundamental misunderstanding of the Female Experience.

As fiction writers, we can’t be bound too tightly by a literal interpretation of write what you know. Still, there are considerations for writing what you don’t know, most of which involve remembering what assuming makes of u—and me, when I laugh at your expense. Which I do, shamelessly, even though I sympathize with those male authors whose writing is excerpted for its ridiculous shortcomings. We all have blind spots, those places to us so foreign we don’t realize how unknown they are until we try to capture them and discover (sometimes too late, courtesy of Reddit) how clueless we really are. Some people happen to be men; I happen to be aroace.

Sci-Hub PSALet me say, for the record, that I have tried.  In college, I was a few biology courses away from a minor in human sexuality. I’ve read studies and theories and analyses; for years, my go-to diversion in social situations was to discuss the erotic plasticity of female goats. (In short: Take a female baby goat and raise her with sheep, then introduce her to other goats as an adult, and she’ll mate with goats and sheep; take a male baby goat and raise him with sheep, and he’ll only mate with sheep even after being introduced to other goats.) At the risk of being uncouth, I’ll just say that I went well out of my way to make sense of sex—in large part because I wanted to be able to write it competently. Now, I understand it enough that I can fictionalize the drive for it the same way I can write about characters who enjoy recreational runs or big parties. Seems kind of sweaty, awkward, and inefficient to me, but hey—live your life. You do you, or your partner, or your partners, so long as there’s informed consent all around.

But then there’s romance. Deep down, part of me suspects romance is a myth, likely fabricate by Hallmark/the government/aliens/the Illuminati. I get emotional intimacy, bonding, attachment, and I get physical intimacy, closeness, affection—all that makes sense. But the idea that what we think of as a Normal Couple is anything other than close friends who also have sex—that there’s some mystical other component called “romance”? Seems a bit Emperor’s New Clothes to me.

In writing, I used to fade to black (or, I guess cut to white) whenever it was time for any sort of sexual activity. Now, I’m no master of erotica, but I like to think I can pull off a typical suggestive-but-not-explicit encounter. Romance, though? It all happens off screen. Take some characters; make them friends; make them get physical; yadda yadda the mysterious part … and bam, now they’re doing Romance.

Deeper down than my skepticism, though, is my fear that maybe some hurdles are too significant. Sure, I can conceptualize the mindset of a serial killer who believes they’re taking an ethically-sound approach to righting societal wrongs, but a character experiencing the development of a romantic relationship? No thanks. I don’t have the emotional fortitude to become a meme.

Just Because

November 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment

Disclaimer: I’m speaking as someone with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a bit of personal experience, not a licensed professional. Please don’t sue me—I can’t afford a lawyer.

Chemical depression is a bitch.

That’s not to say depression brought on by grief, trauma, change, stagnation, etc., is easy—depression in all its forms kind of sucks. The problem with chemical depression, though, at least for me, is that it turns me into a sponge for negativity, for pessimism and fatalism and surrender. We want things to make sense. Effects come from causes. Point B is preceded by point A. Every reaction has an equal and opposite action.

So if I’m feeling bad, something must’ve happened, right?

I was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder at twelve. The thing about kids is that their understanding of normal is shaped so heavily by their lived experience that they often don’t recognize trauma for what it is. A natural place for a therapist to start, then, is exploring that experience, casually probing for wounds the logical mind hasn’t recognized. I have long considered myself a resistant client, based on those early sessions, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that I wasn’t trying to withhold—there just wasn’t much to say. I hit the birth circumstance jackpot: a stable, supportive family, where I never doubted my safety or basic needs, a well-funded school district with access to community resources, no major medical concerns, etc. Of course none of that precludes childhood trauma, and I had bumps here and there, but nothing I could point to as justification for the darkness.

I tried, though. I examined the world around me, looking for a source, something I could unpack and process. I adopted grief for a friend’s mother’s death; I manufactured guilt for a pet’s aging; I shifted the angle in looking back at the bumps to make them seem like mountains. Because these feelings were shallow, I could only delve so deep into them, but at the time, the lack of insight that followed my therapy sessions made them seem more intractable. In trying to make things better, I made them worse.

I hesitate to talk about all this, because my experience is atypical. In general, it’s bad practice, when a person says they’re feeling a certain way just because, to accept that there’s no deeper cause. We’re so socialized to the perfunctory How are you? of custom, not curiosity, that most people need a nudge to dip into anything of substance. Equally bad: when someone says they’re feeling a certain way because of something, to come back with skepticism, a raised eyebrow, an “Are you sure?” that’s dragged out just a little too long to be purely innocent. We’re told not to question the validity of emotions, and it’s a thorny matter to navigate questioning a professed cause without implicitly questioning its effect. So how can I look back on my years of failed therapy and say anyone did anything other than exactly what they should have?

Chemical depression doesn’t come out of nowhere. Still, if there’s a therapeutic model that focuses on motivating my brain to process neurotransmitters properly, I haven’t found it.

The kicker, of course, is that I don’t claim to be well-adjusted outside my depressive episodes. I have some pretty major hangups that impact my life in significant ways (e.g., writerly insecurity so overbearing that, on the occasion I feel confident enough to consider something so presumptuous as thinking about one day trying to publish a novel, I Google literary agents in Incognito mode so someone checking my search history won’t realize how overinflated my ego is) and some life circumstances whose emotional impact I need to sort out (e.g., grieving the loss of a found family). I could absolutely benefit from therapy, and I occasionally have—it just never happens when I’m in a depressive episode, when it should ostensibly be most advised.

I guess the takeaway here, to tie it back to this blog’s loose theme, is that we don’t develop the same way characters do. We can’t always write a backstory to make ourselves make sense. Sometimes the narratives we create can be productive … but sometimes the temptation to find a narrative overwrites the messy, often dissatisfying reality. Maybe that explains some of the correlation between mental illness and writers—the urge to make meaning seeks an outlet, one way or another. There’s little resolution to be found when the answer is just because, but in fiction, we can fix that in revision.

The All-Nighter

October 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

When someone asks, “What sort of music do you like?” I tend to fumble and search for a way to say, “A bit of everything,” without sounding completely vapid. The cliche is a bit of everything except rap and country (which has implications that are a whole different discussion); I never ruled out rap or country, but for a while, I could at least append, “except opera.” It struck me a bit the way ballet does—it’s hard for me to ignore, while listening to it, the fact that there’s supposed to be a larger performance at play. By fluke, I ended up with a dancer friend, and so I ended up at the ballet, and so I cultivated the ability to hold the performance in my head while listening to the music (or else to watch every “Trepak” video on YouTube) but I never had that exposure to opera. Then COVID happened, and a singer friend shared broadcasts from opera folks trying to adapt to the distance, and, well, now I need to come up with something else to exclude.

I want to have an exclusion because I don’t want to give the impression that I like everything. It’s not that I’m not picky, just that my criteria are eclectic, often arbitrary, and rarely connected to any of the labels we use to group things. I think I’ve finally come up with a name for it, though. Let me give it a try and see how it feels.

Hey, Alice, what’s your favorite type of music?

It’s called the all-nighter.

Imagine this: You’re on a creative development team. You were given a week to come up with the Next Big Thing, and now here you are, the day before your big meeting to give the pitch, and you have wastebaskets full of idea maps, brainstorming charts, half-drafted concepts … but no finished product. Most people have headed home for the day, but your team has come to the unspoken agreement that you’ll be staying late. Someone makes a coffee run. You order pizza and continue talking through ideas. Your whiteboard markers are drying out; you’re making a list of themes in yellow when someone else makes a Red Bull run.

Around midnight, you hit a slump. Your meeting is in nine hours. What’s the point? You have nothing; you may as well just go in there and own up to it.

How nihilistic, someone remarks, snapping the pop tab off their long-empty Red Bull. The Next Big Thing is … wait for it … nothing.

There is dejected laughter that dies out into dejected silence, but then something in the mood shifts. Because what if …

The all-nighter is whatever follows that what-if. What if it’s Metallica … but with cellos? What if it’s country, but we replace the F150 and moonshine … with a 747 and mini bottles? What if it’s … whatever this is?

Here’s the other thing about your hypothetical creative development team. The company you work for? They’re understaffed. (Maybe part of the reason it’s 4am on the day of the meeting before you have your pitch ready is that you’ve all been busy doing three jobs?) The all-nighter isn’t just about having a twist; it’s about having a reckless twist, the sort of absurdity that can only flourish under a false sense of invincibility fueled by caffeine, sleep deprivation, and the realization that, well, what are they going to do—fire you?

The all-nighter isn’t a genre just of music. There are all-nighter books, movies, podcasts; there are arguably all-nighter dishes, tea blends, single-batch sour ales that deserve a rerun, if only so I have a chance to stockpile. And, like most things that happen after hours, it’s not always good—part of recklessness, after all, is the higher-than-average chance of a fiery crash-and-burn disaster. I don’t know what makes a given all-nighter successful; all I know is that my new favorite cover is by Like A Storm, which is describes itself as “an Alternative Metal/Rock band from New Zealand, best known for blending heavy riffs with the DIDGERIDOO”:

… and if that doesn’t exemplify 4am pseudo-hypomania, I don’t know what does.

The Tree of Knowledge

October 13, 2021 / / 1 Comment

I knew a man who had a complicated relationship with his father. I should give him a pseudonym—we haven’t talked in years and I don’t know if he would appreciate me writing about him without asking first—but what could I substitute to make it hit the same way when I tell you that his pastor father named him Adam?

Adam’s father died this summer. I learned the way I learn most things these days: online, by accident. I started to type something into the address bar, and my browser autocompleted to Adam’s website. He must’ve let it expire; the URL now belongs to a Chinese patent agency. I googled his name and found the obituary on the second page.

I never met Adam’s father, but I disliked most of what I knew about him. The complex trauma of that family cut deep, and I could see it in Adam and the stories he told me—stories that gradually let me feel like a fly-on-the-wall observer in a sepia-toned flashback, an invisible member of the household in retrospect. One winter, we drove twelve hours to his childhood home, now abandoned. We slept in the car, huddled against the New England cold. The next day, we climbed the nearby mountain so he could recapture the view from his youth, but the fog was dense at the top, so thick I might have lost sight of him if I had wandered too far.

Grief is a tricky thing, rogue-like in its ability to catch you off guard with a knife to your throat and a whispered directive to act normal and follow its instructions. Sometimes it keeps things simple and drives the blade between your ribs—or, simpler still, lifts your wallet and makes its escape before you notice anything missing. I was the one who cut Adam out of my life, but self-inflicted pain still hurts. Last I heard, he and his father weren’t speaking, a point of tension among his siblings. I don’t know if I hope they were able to reconcile.

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