QAC 75.5 – Life Update: Leaving Japan?! | Legal Name Change | Goodbye Locs
over 11 years after first leaving America for Japan, the time has come for me to finally try my hand at life back in the States…
over 11 years after first leaving America for Japan, the time has come for me to finally try my hand at life back in the States…
i have never been a fan of History. from as early as elementary school, i learned that when people said "History" they really only meant theirs and not mine. by junior high school it was clear that my own history—that is, the history of people who are Black and American like me, in so far as U.S. History textbooks were concerned...
occasionally i'll mention that i have a ridiculously poor memory. that i've pretty much always had memory problems and perhaps that's why even as a kid i took to writing in diaries...
sometimes i think about how growing up in Las Vegas has affected me. usually this is triggered by something reminding me that growing up listening to house & trance music on the radio isn't exactly common, or when i happen to have an occasion-- for whatever reason-- to question my own apparent insensitivity to public displays of nudity, sexual innuendo, etc. even when it comes to more mundane things...
Over the course of the past few years or so, I've had no choice but to come face-to-face with the fact that I'm not exactly the spitting image of mental health. That, in fact, I never have been, having struggled with persistent depression and social anxiety for years, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. As such, debilitating depression/anxiety isn't new to me. Simultaneous burnout and mental breakdown on account of blogging was, however.
One-third of my life. That's how much of my life I've lived outside of America. My so-called "home country."
Happy Asexual Awareness Week! I hope you, reader, are doing well. Last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with two activists in Japan to shoot this interview about a topic that is pretty dear to me; that is, about the current state of the asexual community in Japan. It goes without saying that everything that’s said in the video is nothing but the experiences and opinions of three people and should NOT be mistaken as being representative of the experiences or opinions of everyone, but at the same time, who better to ask than two of the most active and dedicated people that I know in what is essentially the current hub for ace activity in Japan (Tokyo)? In this 23-minute and 10-question long (bear with me) interview, I sit down with 21 year old YouTuber, ace activist and friend, Nakaken of Seisei Doudou / 性性堂堂, as well…
in 2014, YouTube outted me to my mom and she’s struggled to understand, let alone accept my sexuality and gender ever since. four years later, things are still touch-and-go when mom finds out that i’m on testosterone and in what she perceives to be a “lesbian relationship”… does her head implode yet again? #ItGetsBetter, they said. well, at this point i have zero fucks to give either way, buuttt i made this #LifeUpdate / #StoryTime video for you anyway. consider this me being ‘officially’ back from being MIA / AFK, i suppose.
it’s always humbling (for me) to be told by someone that something i made / did / said matters to them, but for whatever reason it feels especially… significant? when i’m told it out of the blue offline. i mean, the last thing i expected to happen going into work today was for a coworker, who happened to be in town for an in-house training event, to approach me about having seen me in a BuzzFeed video about asexuality…
in 2015, i wrote a random, word vomit of a post about being “WhenTheStarsAlignHyperRo[mantic]” while offhandedly reflecting back on what little ‘data’ i had to work off of in trying to figure out my own experience of romantic attraction (or lack thereof). it was the first second (in so far as i remember) time i had questioned not being (allo)romantic outside of my head (& journal) while shrugging off identifying as being on the aromantic spectrum.