I was planning to write something quite different today, but what I came up with was too smug - or too smug for my current mood - and rather too negative. But that got me to thinking about negatives. There was a brief period when the NHS offered me a therapist. The therapy was in some ways very useful - I could talk without much of a filter, and without much holding back of detail. My memory of the therapy remains patchy. Every week I would go there, and every week, during the week, I would then forget what my therapist looked like, and imagine, instead, my primary school teacher Mrs. Maleia. And then I’d get to the session, and realise ‘oh, my therapist looks nothing whatever like Mrs. Maleia’. I had the same issue at the GIC with Dr Pavlovic, who I always, mistakenly, remember as resembling Sigmund Freud. I didn’t mention these facts to either of them, as I didn’t want to present myself as a parody of a patient.

Mostly, my therapist would listen, but occasionally she would challenge me. I was rather keen to be challenged, but I felt at the time she was picking unhelpful points to challenge me on. One was that I didn’t show much emotion in the sessions. I would have if I could have, but I don’t have control over my emotions. I’m not actually an emotional person. That’s not a choice. I never dave been very much. On rare occasions I will weep at length and weep bitterly - but that’s for special occasions! Therapy is facts and storytelling, and constructing, from my life, a narrative I hadn’t been able to see at the time. I learned a lot from that. But I wasn’t going to put on a show and pretend to be more emotive than I was.

The other thing she queried a couple of times was my self-description of non-binary and asexual. Non-binary is neither male nor femal, and asexual means I’ve no appetite for sex. It just doesn’t turn me on. I have never once said ‘hubba hubba’. She wasn’t keen on the fact that I described myself with two negative words, non-one thing and a-the other. I can see her point, but... those are the words for those things. That is the vocabulary, in this decade, for things I struggled for twenty-five years to articulate, so I was irked to be told the only words I knew were negative.

Yes, there are dozens of alternative words for non-binary identities, but they all have specific meaning and nuance.

I was disappointed as a child, when I realised how much of life is about determining what we aren’t and what we won’t be. You can’t be an astronaut and the prime minister. You have to decide relatively young where you want to specialise, in terms of education. I’ve chosen not to be a teacher in real schools, and at different stages chosen not to be a scientist, not to learn Spanish, not to go into medicine or the church or the stage. Some of those have been reliefs, some of them have been disappointed realisations. It’s good to be disillusioned, but it’s not fun. When Matt Smith was cast as television’s Doctor Who, that was the day I accepted the role would never be mine. Every childhood dream and every adulthood dream leads to success, or to a cold decision, or to a sense of ‘what was I ever thinking?’, or you shelve it, or you forget it entirely, or you suddenly perish when you were still working hard to reach the prize.

Pity. Life isn’t very short, to be honest. There’s loads and loads of it and we can do a lot each day, week, month, year and fortnight. But we spend it making myriad choices. But neither my gender nor my lack of romantic appetite were choices. I discovered them. I accepted them, and then embraced them. The process was messy, but I’m glad of the end result. They aren’t the most important parts of my character, and while I know I’ll never do even one percent of the things I dream I could do in this life, I have a sure and certain hope that there’s life beyond it.

For now I’ve a trio of negatives I’ll cleave to. No especial gender. No loins or groins. No Sundays in Lent.