Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

The Emperor’s New Romance: An Aroace Writes Normative

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

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

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

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.

NaNoCoMo

So this Paris thing.

I sometimes wonder if, as an atheist, I can believe in capital-E Evil. Goodness faces badness; kindness faces cruelty; Evil seems like it ought to face something like Holy, which isn’t a concept I connect with.

But not everything needs an opposite to exist. What, after all, is the opposite of a platypus?

So maybe I can believe in evil, and Evil, and its daily presence in the world. Maybe part of the reason I sometimes doubt it is that I’m often removed from it, physically and mentally and emotionally. I will confess—and it is a confession, something I am ashamed of—that I am not very up-to-date on global happenings. I have the luxury of ignoring Evil.

I can’t explain why Paris hit me as hard as it did. By most measures, I’m no more or less connected to it than I have been to any of the other sightings of Evil. But Paris had me glued to my computer screen, watching the coverage, hearing the different numbers and speculations.

The point of terrorism is to terrorize. I don’t know why it worked on me, though obviously only fractionally in comparison. Part of it is the act itself—the shooter waiting outside an emergency exit, the total mundanity of some of the sites—but part of it is the fallout. I was almost twelve on September 11, 2001; I had no concept of what it would turn into. I may still be cushioned by ignorance, but I’m not naïve like I was then.

But enough about that. Other people will write more insightful things about Paris; it’s not actually the point of this.

November, as you might know, is NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words by the end of the month, all that. I first did it in 2005, just after my sixteenth birthday; I then did it in ’06, ’07, and ’08. In ’09, I slipped, and life got the better of me; in ’10, I decided I would make up for ’09 by doubling down and doing 100,000 words. I succeeded, and then some, and ended up with a chunk of novel weighing in at about 140,000 words, almost all of which needed revising.

I got about 75% through a first pass, big-picture revision. I can’t remember exactly what got me off track, but for whatever reason, I got wrapped up in other things.

I reread it this past week, surprised by how much I didn’t hate it.

Flash back, for a moment, to 2005. It was a novel, and it had a plot, but I was sixteen, okay, and so of course I was pretty heavily present in one of the characters. This character was like me, except that he possessed the capacity to tell people off—to call them out on self-destructive behavior and be all, “Knock that off!” He said to the people around him all the things I wanted to say to the people around me. It was cathartic. It helped me cope with the sense of helplessness you get watching someone self-destruct.

Over time, my writing has gotten less overtly self-reflective, although I don’t believe we can ever fully remove ourselves from our work. I indulge fewer fantasies through my characters, and when I do, it’s never so dramatic. (Perhaps by giving them a witty comeback I wish I’d used when it was opportune, or an Irish Wolfhound, because in reality, I know I shouldn’t actually have one, but oh man, do I wish I could justify it, because who wouldn’t want a shaggy grey dog the size of a pony? Lame people, that’s who.) Only here’s the thing about that novel.

It’s about hate crimes, and intolerance, and violence in the name of principle. And it’s about working against those things. And I think I might finish revising it as my NaNoWriMo substitute this year. NaNoCoMo, I’ll call it: National Novel Coping Month. When you can’t fix the real problems, invent some new ones you can. There are worse strategies.

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