one identity crisis at a time, baby

Every so often someone asks me if I’m going to continue with my erotic/steamy romance line, and it’s easier to send them a link to this blog post than it is to keep explaining myself (and as simple as the answer can be, I’m not sure that I can simplify it, if only because of the neurodivergent urge to overexplain), so—*shania twain voice* let’s go, girls:

Once upon a time, when Covid meant something that we took seriously during that single/fleeting/forgotten hot girl lockdown summer, I wrote my first book in a two-week frenzy of whatever it was that possessed me in that nebulous cloud of time. I was just so tired of Not Having Done It yet that I finally did it, because life was officially chaos so what did I have to lose?

Nothing, really. But that first book (and the one that followed a year later) wasn’t really what I wanted to write; I just felt like I had to.

And I don’t mean that in the “I write because I HAVE to” way, the “I write because it’s the song of my heart and it must be SUNG” way, or whichever other way you equate the irresistible compulsion to create, I don’t know, I always think these declarations are poetic and overwrought for no reason, but then again I’m caught in a pretty regular cycle of artistic ennui so maybe I should just shut the hell up.

Anyway.

No, what I mean is that I wrote my first book (not What’s Your Vibe?, although I consider that to be the debut that counts, and more on that later in the post) when I was amidst another fanfiction fixation, and when I wrote fic I went all-in on the explicit stuff, because that was fun enough to convince myself that that’s what I wanted my original stuff to be, too.

But writing fic and writing original work is Different. It’s hard to explain the hows and whys with any real specificity—but you feel it, as soon as you start drafting that original story. I could write sex scenes with fun, reckless abandon when they involved characters that already exist, characters that made me go, “They could fix everything if they’d just make out already.” But when you’re starting off with your own story, there’s no foundation to work with; you’re building something from scratch, and that can change what you want to build.

So this was my major driving force, that I had fun writing these steamy romances for my favorite ships so of course that means I should write steamy romances of my own, right?

*game show buzzer* Not right.

My first two books have a special place in my heart for what they allowed me to let go of, but it took a while for me to actually relinquish it all completely. I felt this doubt about them from the start (and maybe that’s the real reason I wrote them under a very different pseudonym, which I won’t be sharing; the ebooks are still available, mostly because you can’t fully delist from Amazon anyway, but I have zero desire to market these anymore). It just didn’t feel quite right.

Which brings me to the titular ongoing identity crisis.

More to the point, I didn’t feel quite right—and that was for a long time. I ignored my sexuality, accepted my “straightness” because what else could I be? However not-quite-right, it didn’t feel like it mattered.

After ending my first serious relationship—as abusive as it was formative—I struggled even more. I was nineteen years old, which is hard enough without all that baggage you can’t put down because you don’t know where it fits. I tried to make it fit somewhere, anywhere, which didn’t do anything but make me entirely self-destructive, breaking myself apart piece by piece to make more room.

(And here I go, with that poetic and overwrought vibe I say I don’t get. Vague, too, but the details are reserved for therapy.)

I was trying so hard, desperate for someone to prove my ex wrong—so I wanted to be wanted for the wrong reasons. Or maybe there was something right about them, or at least neutral. It didn’t matter that I didn’t even want what I was going after; the only thing that mattered was that he wasn’t right, that I wasn’t “ruined for anyone else.”

(He really said that, by the way. If you’re ever writing a villain and someone tells you they’re too much of a caricature, that someone is wrong. The real-life bad guys seriously talk like that. In retrospect, it’s almost funny—like, what happened to me isn’t, but I still can’t believe he really pulled monologues from CW teen dramas. Fucking idiot.)

To cut this short for my own sake, I turned to sexuality to give me a sense of worth. I don’t think that would have worked even if I was straight, but being demisexual made it… harder? Or just as hard, but in a different way. An unfamiliar way. The whole experience would have been hard no matter what, but not understanding my sexuality was another burden on top of everything else.

Because even when I learned that there were options besides gay or straight, I didn’t accept it for myself. I thought I did, at first, but as I tried to cope with the aftermath of abuse in the worst possible ways, I couldn’t embrace my demisexuality. Anything, I thought, anything would be easier than this—I had to make myself want someone, so they could make me believe I was more than what my ex made me think I was.

I projected my fantasies onto people so I could trick myself into thinking we had an emotional connection, trick myself into believing that we had that bond, because I need to have that before I can feel anything sexual.

I know now that sex isn’t that important; at the very least, it’s not the Most important thing. Because it can be great and gorgeous and fun, but how you feel about it is a case-by-case basis. And in any of those cases, sex doesn’t save relationships, but it can ruin them.

I didn’t realize that back then. Between my ex and just, general opinion and media and pop culture, I was made to believe that you needed sex, you had to want it or something was wrong with you.

So I overcompensated. Even as I moved past what happened to me and the self-destructive ways I tried to cope with it all, I overcompensated. It was arguably more positive now, but then again I don’t think there’s anything positive about denying who you really are, even if it’s “not bad,” comparably, to trauma.

…I don’t know. I’m unpacking a lot here and it’s hard to be eloquent.

I tried, anyway, to turn sexuality into something positive rather than something I used to make myself feel worthy. So that is good, except I was still… not accepting my demisexuality.

That was another reason why I tried to build my career in high-steam and erotic romance. I found a lot of solace in that in fanfic, and I thought I could find it more in my own work, in that community. I wanted to, so badly, because that would have been easy. And when I say easy, I mean it would have been easier than being honest with myself.

In the process of integrating myself into that community, though, all I felt was invalidated. As much as I’d already been invalidating myself—denying, refusing, trying on every other hat—it’s something else to hear that from other people. I read romance books that didn’t resonate with me because that’s not how I experience love, and I saw the way people talked about romance: So many times I saw some variation of “I write smut because I’m not a coward,” and felt equal parts shame and indignation (and also just basic annoyance? I know how much shit people talk about romance, but on the flipside of that coin, y’know, the most popular and lucrative books right now range from steamy to scorching, so I think you guys are doing Just Fine, actually).

I’d been dealing with my own self-hatred for years, but to see this community be so openly (and however accidentally, but that doesn’t change the fact of the matter) aphobic did something to me. I didn’t belong here. The positive experience I was trying to cultivate couldn’t grow here. That positive experience was inauthentic from its inception, and it died in a field of ignorance.

I feel badly about myself without anyone else’s help, and in fact no one can do it like I do (…there’s a “Gaston” parody in here somewhere). So what’s the point of your asshole comments? You’re not even good at them. This is embarrassing for everyone involved.

There’s a lot wrapped up in the book culture around romance, but when it came down to the decisions I needed to make for myself, I knew this wasn’t the place for me because a place hadn’t been made, and I wasn’t interested in creating one amidst an environment where I wasn’t going to be happy.

Be the change you want to see, and blah blah blah, but you also need to do what’s right for you, and that doesn’t always mean breaking barriers in some big flashy way. Sometimes it’s just breaking the barriers you set for yourself and now you know those barriers are bullshit so down they go.

The change I wanted to see was in myself. It wasn’t about changing the world—I am but one very tired and existentially distressed woman, after all—but rather about embracing who I really am, and what I want to do with that.

Realizing this wasn’t a lightbulb or a thunderclap or any kind of eureka hallelujah. It was a path of twists and turns and backpedals and going the wrong way before clocking that, yes, this is totally the wrong way, and turning around again. Straight and narrow, meet queer and wiggly-waggling all over the place.

What’s Your Vibe? became something almost completely different than I’d initially intended—and likely different than what people expect from a sex shop romcom. The fact is, I can’t write a romcom according to the rules. I write romantic and I write funny, but those aren’t the only components of a romantic comedy. But I wrote this book with the realization that there’s no formula, no set of tropes, no expectations I wanted to adhere to—I wrote this for me, I wrote this for the asexual spectrum people I’ve talked to who also feel ostracized by the rules of romance, I wrote this for people who want to think about what they’re reading and what it means to them; and if it doesn’t mean anything to you, well, then I probably didn’t write it for you.

(I mean, you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to think about anything, I don’t even know you. But I write with the intention of y’all doing some mental gymnastics through the playground of your feelings, so. Figure it out. If you want. Or whatever. It’s not really my business anymore.)

I guess the tl;dr version of this is “Write what you want to read.” I think that’s the only writing advice worth anybody’s breath anyway. You’re the one doing all the work, so you better be sure you’re doing something you actually want to spend your energy on.

Which isn’t to say it’s that simple—I think my journey is a testament to the fact that knowing what you want isn’t so cut-and-dry. I didn’t even like my journey, and I barely appreciate it, either. I’m not going to try to ascribe any Greater Meaning to it; it fuckin’ sucked. We can play the “Wasn’t it worth it, though?” game but if you ask me that I have to assume you have Live, Laugh, Love home decor and as such we are just fundamentally different people.

(I’ll be fair and say that Live, Laugh, Love is really a very nice sentiment. I just don’t know what you need wall art about it for, take your Xanax.)

So anyway. I’m writing what I want, and I want to write fun dialogue and emotional dissertations about music and the queer experience in ways I experienced it and the ways I understand it and all the ways it’s beautiful, and I want to write about journeys that suck and sometimes they’re worth it and sometimes it’s like, “not really,” but you gotta do it anyway, and I want to write whatever I feel like—and I don’t want any of that to be determined by trends or tropes or what pops off on Goodreads because I hate Goodreads (if you like my books, for the love of Dolly, rate and review on whichever retailer’s site you bought them from) and if I never see the word “spice” accompanied by the hot pepper emoji as some kind of indication of quality ever again then it will be too soon.

…I think that about does it. Ten-plus years of identity crisis distilled into a single blog post. How very early 2000s of me.