In my experience, the older I’ve gotten as an aro person the more comfortable I’ve gotten with my identity but also the more isolating it’s gotten. Many friendships just kind of fall away over time even when people aren’t in relationships, because many people just don’t prioritize them as much in general. I’ve found myself somewhat by accident in a romantic relationship that I enjoy (it was a 1 in a million kind of thing), and didn’t even realize how much social and physical interaction I was going without until it suddenly was there again. At the same time though it’s still isolating among people in relationships (double dates are bizarre for one…) that I don’t measure my partner against other potential partners, I measure him against how okay I was with being alone, which was very other than the isolation; if we were to separate for whatever reason I’d be upset to lose this relationship in particular but in the big picture totally fine just going back to flying solo.

Basically I’ve just learned to accept as an aro that I’m on a really different wavelength from all the allo people in my life and to try not to put too much blame on individual allo people for the way amatonormativity screws us all over.

I left Texas for Washington over 10 years ago now partly because even then it was known as a trans haven in the community - it has plenty of its own problems (especially cost of living and the continued effects of redlining) but I’ve only rarely felt unsafe here and the parts of my physical and legal transition that I’ve done here have been relatively straightforward and uncomplicated even navigating insurance. I’ve also not had many outright discrimination issues with employers, if anything I deal with more tokenism issues. I don’t dislike Texas entirely and even miss some of my family and some things about it, but getting to live my life fully is worth the trade off; that’s a determination everyone needs to make for themselves though!

I worked in database administration for years and currently work in a database admin adjacent role and the only things I type are on the internet, emails, data entry, and official/final documents and documentation. I much prefer handwriting for basically everything else - especially for note taking, typing is too linear and non-visual for the way I like to lay notes out with many sketched arrows, diagrams, etc. I also perceive my data to be much more ephemeral in a digital format unless I’m going through the trouble of making multiple backups which…why would I when I can just achieve the same thing with a pen and notebook that I just have to be physically careful with and know the material limitations of. I especially don’t trust whatever note-taking apps du jour to have long-lasting reliable data retention, I mostly just use my phones note taking app for the occasional on the go grocery list.

To be fair though I’m for one one of the kinds of IT people whose knowledge of the field makes me less trustful rather than more trustful of anything that’s, to me, technologically overengineered; and I also am already on the computer all the time for my job, so much prefer to be off of it as much as possible during my free time.

I’m predominantly aromantic and so have pretty much entirely avoided any specifically dating apps, spaces, get togethers, etc - just have no interest in pursuing it just for the sake of pursuing it. I do have a LTR though and met my partner at my previous workplace, we went out because he wanted to stay in touch when I took another job and ended up hitting it off unexpectedly despite almost 4 years of mostly just having polite quick workplace conversations. We have somewhat different interests (he’s very into anime and manga while I’m more of a outdoors and animals queer hahahaha) but we get along well and have really similar personalities and values.

I guess the only piece of advice I can really impart with my own experience in mind is to just be open to unexpected relationships with people you already know! I do think it helps too though that neither of us came into this with big expectations, it was super casual and comfortable from the very beginning with none of the pomp and circumstance of first dates and navigating getting to know each other and all. I think folks can get really hung up on all these rituals of dating and it just gets in the way of organic connections.

Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the US south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.

This was actually the book we mostly learned from in my art classes way back in high school, my teacher was a big believer in it! I don’t think it’s necessarily a one stop shop for learning to draw, and the science is pretty outdated, but I do agree with the other commenter that it’s handy for learning to loosen up and to look at and notice things in the way you need to to be able to draw them. Rather than going all in on one method I’ve found it really beneficial since then to add more classical construction and anatomy/form study techniques to the techniques I’ve learned from it, I think they complement each other well. But I do still very much find it handy on its own specifically when I want to render a really exact image from reference.