Touch, Gender, Orientation, Skype And Religion

The title of this post gathers all the things I've been thinking about lately into a nice five-word list. Of course, all of these words are much more complex and complicated than their sounds. I'm still sifting through them for myself (I think we're always sifting).

I dreamed the other night that my friends finally understood that I needed touch to survive. One of them put his hands on my shoulders when he talked to me, one hugged me, and one held my hand and another played with my hair. I felt so loved and warm when I woke up. I wish people were better able to express love in this way and not feel like it's sexual or creepy.

I've been thinking about orientation a lot (as usual). I have more and more friends who are not 'straight' and it honestly refreshes me. It's hard to be around straight people all the time. There are things I can't explain, and even some people who aren't straight don't understand.

I have this one friend I talked to on Skype the other night - he was saying I should become a nun since I'm asexual. I tried to explain that just because I don't have a sex drive doesn't mean I don't want a relationship. Because I do.

I want a committed, long-term relationship. It's why I got married. I want to hold someone's hand through life. In all the wretchedness, it helps to know that someone loves you so deeply that they will wade through the dark water with you.

I want to take care of someone and be taken care of - I want a partner. I want to spend the rest of my life with someone. I just don't want to have sex with them.

I guess most people don't understand that. They also don't understand when I try to explain that I'm genderfluid. I just realized how much of a gap there is between orientation and gender, and it finally clicked with me that what I am is a genderfluid asexual.

There are some days where I feel masculine. I feel weird and uncomfortable in dresses and I want to wear suits and ties. I feel like taking the lead in a relationship. I feel more at home hanging out with the guys. There are days when I want to get my hands dirty and chop wood and shoot guns and do things that are typically seen as 'male'. (This doesn't make these things male or masculine-coded but rather society has masculine-coded them in such a way that to be attracted to these things is in some ways taking on the label 'masculine')

And there are days where I want to wear dresses and feel more comfortable around girls. There are days where I want to be feminine, whatever that looks like for me.

I'm attracted aesthetically to both males and females (it depends on the person, which I guess would mean I'm probably panromantic) - when they're clothed. I don't like nakedness.

But I have both kinds of days. I have dreams where I'm male.

It's not androgyny. It truly is a spectrum of gender for me. I'm fluid, flowing from one side of the spectrum to the other, depending on the day, my mood, what I need to do, and what I'm doing.

How does all of this tie into religion? I'm not sure. Maybe it doesn't.

I'm just tired of trying to make all the pieces fit. And I noticed a week or two weeks or  maybe a long time ago that the little light I hid under a shell inside my soul to keep it safe had been extinguished. I don't know how it happened. It's just gone.

Would Christianity accept me? Would God accept me?

I'm a genderfluid, panromantic/romantic (?) asexual. I have clinical depression. I'm opposed to the death penalty and I believe in equal rights. I'm in love with television and I can't abide religious/political institutions and authority figures. I want to give up my citizenship and seek shelter in a less widely known place (I dream of becoming Canadian). I want to act and befriend all sorts of people.

Is there room in the Kingdom for me? Is there a Kingdom?

I don't know where I am anymore, but I'm getting a clearer picture of who I am.