The Parts of Self

The parts of my Self experience the world in different ways.  My mind, my intellect, appreciates aesthetic beauty and that is easy for me to recognize.  The human form is beautiful in its incredible variety as is the natural world.  I appreciate the beauty of artistic expression, color, light, line and movement.  There are so many beautiful sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, thoughts, and language.   A beautiful woman, a beautiful man, is a joy to behold.  I experience these through my physical senses and appreciate them with my mental self.

This appreciation might then become an emotional experience.  It might elicit an emotional response.  This is also relatively easy to recognize.  Even when it turns back upon my body, returns to a physical experience, a visceral reaction.  It is still an aesthetic appreciation.  The human form is aesthetically beautiful.  I have a mental and intellectual appreciation for that beauty.  It may on occasion become an emotional or visceral experience but that is not a sexual one.

Interacting with another person, one whom I actually know, is another kind of experience.   Generally speaking I experience others through my emotions.  My emotional responses might be affection or repulsion, but they affect how I perceive others.  Those whom I love are beautiful to me.  I experience them through my emotions primarily and I can see the beauty of them more clearly as a result.  I can also see those who are not, no matter how aesthetically pleasing they might be to the world.  My emotional response to someone I care for is real but, it is rarely a sexual one.  While I have experienced a sexual attraction to someone I care for, I have never felt sexual attraction without an emotional connection. 

It is more difficult for me to recognize the difference between emotional and energetic responses.  I believe that the sexual attraction I have felt for a loved one has been due to my energetic response.  The emotional connection has always existed first but, my energetic reactions seem to determine if I respond to my loved ones as mother, sister, friend, daughter or “lover”. 

My energetic response that results in sexual attraction does not seem to be determined by the gender of the other person nor their sexual orientation.   So how do I define my sexual orientation?  I read a definition the other day of a word I have never been exposed to.  Demisexual is somewhere between bisexual and asexual.  Maybe I do not need to actually define it.  I believe that I have primarily heterosexual preferences but, I have found myself at times sexually attracted to a woman whom I know and care for.  I have even had erotic dreams about other women on occasion.  But I do believe that for me, emotional affection and energetic responses are the crucial factors in the equation. 

One of the many things I need to explore is what exactly can take me from sexual attraction to that most elusive state, sexual arousal.  But that is for another day.