The Question I Cannot Fully Answer

The question I keep circling is where did my reaction come from. Not what it feels like now, because I can describe that with enough precision to make myself uncomfortable, but where it began. What was the first moment? Was there one? Was there some single origin point, some before-and-after event my mind can no longer access cleanly, or was this reaction built more slowly, like sediment, one layer of discomfort and fear and social pressure at a time until my nervous system finally decided that anything resembling this category belonged in the danger pile?

I do not know.

And that is an extremely unsatisfying sentence for me to write, because so much of my writing is built around the pleasure of finally having language for things. I like when a concept clicks into place. I like when an experience that once felt like a private failure turns out to have a name, a framework, a community, a lineage of other people describing similar experiences from different angles. That was part of what made finding aromanticism and asexuality so powerful for me. I had spent years thinking something was wrong with me, and then suddenly there were words that did not erase the difficulty but at least made it legible. “Not broken, just different” is not a magic spell, but it is close enough when you have spent long enough thinking your entire internal operating system was malfunctioning.

So naturally, when I encounter this other thing in myself, this intense and disproportionate and deeply physical reaction to sexually charged group dynamics, some part of me wants the same kind of revelation. I want to find the correct label, the correct memory, the correct mechanism, the hidden sentence underneath all the scrambled ones. I want to say: here, this is why. This is the event, this is the wound, this is the psychological pathway, this is the clean explanatory bridge from then to now. But the more honest answer is that I do not have that bridge, or at least I do not have enough of it to cross with confidence.

There are possibilities, of course. There are always possibilities, and my brain is very good at generating them in ways that feel both analytically impressive and emotionally unhelpful. One possibility is that there is some earlier memory I have repressed or displaced, some experience that taught my body to treat this topic as dangerous before my conscious mind had the vocabulary to understand what was happening. I want to be careful with that possibility, because it is not nothing, but it is also not evidence. Trauma memory is complicated, and memory in general is complicated, and I do not want to do that thing where a person mistakes the intensity of their present reaction for proof of a specific past event. The body can remember patterns without handing you a neatly labeled photograph. It can also misattribute danger, overgeneralize from one wound to a whole category, or respond to symbolic similarities that do not mean the same thing happened before. I say this not to undermine my own experience, but to keep myself honest while writing from inside it.

I have theories. I have fears about my theories. I have moments where the researcher part of my brain wants to put on a little detective hat and start connecting every memory with red string, and then I have the more cautious part of me that says, hey, maybe don’t go excavating your own psyche with a shovel you bought from the anxiety store.

But even when I try to say the direct words for certain group sexual dynamics, my brain does this awful skidding motion, like a car trying to brake too late on gravel. The sentence loses traction. I delete the phrase. I replace it. I delete it again. Then I realize there is not really a more accurate way to say it, so I put it back and sit there feeling ridiculous because a few words on a screen should not have that much power over me, and yet here we are.

This paper is a lived-experience account, not a legal claim, not a diagnostic report, and not an attempt to reverse-engineer certainty out of pain. When I describe something as traumatic, I am describing the impact it had on me, the way it shaped my nervous system and my relationships and my ability to feel safe in certain contexts. When I describe something as feeling like betrayal, I am naming the experience as I processed it, including the fact that some of that processing happened years later with more language than I had at the time. When I talk later about sexual harm or possible sexual harm involving people I cared about, I have to acknowledge that I am writing from my perception, from what I was told, from how I understood the dynamics, and from the ethical concerns that were alive in me then and are still alive in me now. I am not omniscient. I was not inside everyone’s mind. I do not know every detail of what happened or what each person believed they were doing. But I do know what hearing about it did to me.