Ace Daydreams
The March 2021 Carnival of Aces is dreams.
I love daydreaming even more than I love talking about writing. And you're right, this set up is not conducive to completing stories. But for now I'm enjoying the ride.
How characters connect with eachother in my daydreams varies. I've tapped into a dozen attraction types (yes there are a dozen or more), woven in boundary and expectation discussions, visualized hug positions and slow escalation of intimacy and breaking away and coming back together.
The bit that trips me up is - what do I want for myself?
Do I want a person to sleep next to in bed? To lean against on the couch? To confide my emotional pain in? To split the chores with? To ask "how was your day"? To inform for the hundredth time how adorable my cat is? To take with me to family gatherings?
I don't know.
Enjoying a daydream is a very shaky error-ridden blueprint for what would be enjoyed in reality.
In these quarantine times, I can't go out and experiment. And - even when normalcy starts creeping back in - I am reluctant to experiment. I predict there will be rejection, differing expectations despite discussing expectations, a fear I'll get bored, the guilt of getting bored of a person, a struggle to communicate what I want, the difficulty of trusting a person to respect and understand my boundaries, the difficulty of enforcing boundaries and not shutting down.
It sounds exhausting.
Is it worth seeking out a relationship to satisfy my curiousity, to possibly increase my happiness? Are those unethical and selfish reasons?
It's very tempting to play the defensive ethics card of "I'm bound to cause another person and myself pain, so I should just not" and stay in my daydreaming comfort zone.
An alluring compromise is to say "I'll just stay open to a relationship," except this is secretly staying in the comfort zone. I may not know exactly what I want, but it isn't the amatonormative behavior set. So if I'm ever going to get whatever it is I want, I would have to be proactive.
Perhaps the dream is all I want.
Perhaps I'm just telling myself that so I don't have to wake up and push.
The audio part of this is so interesting, unique, and cool! Thanks for your submission, I appreciate the questioning and all the unknowns of what you'd enjoy in reality despite what might be enjoyable in real life.
ReplyDeleteAlso, of course I totally get what you're saying at the end about the comfort zone and how wanting something not amatonormative might be something you have to be proactive about, at least if what you want isn't what you already have in some way.
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