Tales of My Cubawan, VI: Am I Queer & The Destruction of Libido
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Welcome back or welcome if this is your first time! This is the true story of me and my late adoptive son, code-named Otso, if you’re late to the party. And in my memories are all sorts of really bizarre and strange stories about him, because he was a funny guy. In today’s edition, we’re going to explore more of his healthy masculinity and his relationship to sex, and how it changed drastically after one pointed question.
So, I’ve said in earlier parts of the story, he was very good looking and very desirable because of the way he looked out for women. I know a lot of readers will be like, “wtf you were like his mom, why did you know so much about his sex life?” Well, on one hand, I think it’s actually really harmful for people to continuously put a lot of shame on the concept of sex, a thing that very literally none of us would exist without. Open communication is always the route to healthier relationships. Plus, like, he was a 20-something male. Of course he’d be gettin’ it on, if he could, and especially with all the drug use, that can tend to (and in his case definitely did) exacerbate any and all sense of horniness. So for me to deny or shame that would benefit absolutely no one. If he wanted to and felt safe telling me those stories, so be it.
Also, though, I think he just found me to be such a safe space that he’d tell me anything that came to mind, and he happened to have a lot of weird sex stories. We even had an inside joke that went something like, “GAWD mom, I know how to have sex with myself!” though admittedly, I don’t remember the context for it. I just remember that it was supposed to be the name of a psytrance song, hah.
But, perhaps one of the funniest stories he told was about New Year’s Eve 2021.
He had agreed to a tinder date with a trans woman. She, from what he told me, had a very cheeky personality, and a big ol’… use your imagination. He had no idea if he was into penises at all, and I swear that nothing made me more proud than his willingness to try and find out. Few men are so secure in their gender that they can fool around with someone who has the same package they do just to see if they’re into it.
Ultimately, they had a good time hanging out, but he wasn’t really into the whole penis thing, so he decided that it wasn’t for him. But again, I was proud that he gave it the good ol’ college try.
Now here’s where the story gets funny. I mentioned in brief before that I had replaced his nightmare bed, but the replacement came with one simple rule: he was not allowed to have sex in that bed until he slept in it (literally sleeping) with someone he trusted. I wanted this new bed to be a place of peace and safety, as given by the protection of his mamabear. I didn’t want it to just be another fuck den bed.
So, he used the other bed in their apartment. And, in an inebriated accident, he sent a message to his roommate, saying something along the lines of, “I slept with a trans woman in your bed,” but in Finnish and with more vulgar and offensive wording, because he was trolling his roommate. Because apparently that was the sort of thing he did, heh. Only, because of the inebriation, he accidentally sent the message to the group chat I put together for WST Thunderfuck 2021 (that’s my annual Christmas dinner party for my chosen family, if you’re wondering). So all of my nearest and dearest friends got a little insight into his love life that night and we all had a good ol’ riproarin’ laugh about it afterwards. The best part? When he said, “Well… good that I didn’t send that to my work chat.” Indeed, cub, indeed, haha.
However, this rampaging libido of his—which he once described as not having really died off since puberty—didn’t outlast his first weekend staying at our house, which was, I believe, in the first month or two of 2022.
We were still finding our way around one another back then, so I remember… okay, first of all, he fell asleep immediately after coming over. As per usual.
Actual depiction of him that weekend
I’m not sure why I’ve always particularly liked this picture. I gave him the hat, the headphones, and the grey sweater (which he particularly loved), and perhaps it’s the most “normal” he looked sleeping. You can still see the bags under his eyes, but somehow he feels super cute to me in this one.
After he eventually woke up and we had dinner, he went on his phone and started scrolling Tinder. This really bothered me, but I was having a hard time figuring out why, so I went into my office to get some space and figure out what was going on in my brain and why this irritated me so much. Was I jealous? Because logically, it seemed like a weird thing to be jealous about, because I wasn’t trying to be his girlfriend. So why did it annoy me so much?
But also, I removed myself because I didn’t want to project whatever was going on in my head onto him and make him uncomfortable or anything, at least before I knew what was up. I was always very cautious to figure out my shit before we had conversations, so I knew where I was coming from and wouldn’t push my problems on him.
Eventually, I started to clue into what was bothering me, which had to do with presence. Here I was, giving so much, and he was coming to my house and low-key ignoring me to scroll for dates. That was what was irritating me. But also… I didn’t know why exactly he was looking for a relationship. I’ll get into that in a moment though.
Now, he wasn’t always super self-aware, as I’ve said, but if I left his side for any significant length of time when we were hanging out, he did tend to notice. So, he came into the office to check on me, and I admitted I was feeling kind of off. We talked about this a bit and he agreed that he should probably put his phone away when he was spending time with me.
But then I asked the million dollar question. “I’m curious why you’re looking for girlfriends right now. I don’t mean anything by this, but… what do you have to offer someone in a relationship, in the emotional tangle you’re in at the moment?”
His response?
Thousand. Yard. Dead. Stare.
It was like I encountered a 404 Error in his brain.
Lots of young people are in pursuit of relationships without ever really thinking about why they want them. He fell into this category. He liked attention, liked being loved, liked sex, all that sort of thing. But when he thought about himself and what he had to offer another person, only one word came out his mouth.
“…Nothing.”
The realization of this actually broke him. I can’t even remember if we ended up watching a movie that night (this may have taken place after… cut me some slack, I have a lot of memories—I can’t keep them all straight). He was so devastated by this information that he went into a severe depression and just went into the guest room and didn’t really come out for 24 hours.
Now, here’s the thing. That was the correct answer, but I wasn’t expecting him to get there on his own with no help. But it was, indeed, true. He was in such terrible trauma knots that, as I mentioned before, two things happened when he got into relationships. Either, he ended up dating women who were arguably more fucked up than he was—he had one relationship where the girl was so jealous and possessive that she basically locked him in her house for the better part of a year. So, you can imagine that this only made his traumas and mental knots worse. The alternative was that he’d date nice girls, girls he really liked, but then due to his lifestyle or mental trauma, circumstances, whatever, he’d cheat or get angry or do something stupid, and he’d ruin a good thing. There was one girl that was particularly special to him, he’d known her most of his life, she was beautiful, sweet, kind, understanding of where he came from, but he messed that one up and it was his one biggest relationship regret.
So when he examined all of this, without my help, he realized that he was in absolutely no place to be in a relationship and he shut down completely.
I checked up on him constantly, but he was just listening to music in bed, staring off into oblivion, and didn’t really want to talk or see me or do anything. I worried my face off the whole time, but then suddenly—I want to say it was sometime on Saturday afternoon, but in all fairness, it could have even been Sunday—he came out of the room looking rather fresh-faced and said one of the most emotionally mature things I recall him ever saying:
“Okay, I’m done feeling bad. I came here to spend the weekend with you guys, and, yeah, what you asked me made me really depressed, but I figure that I came here to be with you and have a good time, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
We probably watched something stupid, like Happy Gilmore, cackling at one of my all-time favorite lines in any comedy ever.
But… this whole event really made me think about how deep and clever he was under all that trauma. As I’ve said, his self-awareness wasn’t always great, but his self-examination was usually extremely honest and he didn’t pull punches or deny bad aspects of himself. He was haunted by them chronically, so, much like his mamabear, he faced his shit straight-on without pandering to his own ego, and I loved him all to death for it.
That choice of wording both is and is not extremely funny.
So when he looked at himself and looked at the kind of boyfriend he was capable of being at that point (the beginning) of his healing journey, he realized that this was simply not something he should be putting time or energy into at the time. He knew that he had to work on himself before he had anything to offer someone else. It was okay for him to take advantage of me a little bit, because that was what I was offering him, as I wanted him to heal and get better. But trying to have a relationship with someone else while doing that was simply not a good idea. It would be, at best, a distraction from his inner work, and at worse, would just make everything worse. And he figured all of that out on his own, without help.
But the most fascinating thing about all of this was that his libido was obliterated. As I said, by his own description, he operated on the level of a pubescent teenager. Somehow, though, that one simple question and self-insight that followed completely killed his sex drive. I thought he’d stop the fucking Tinder scrolling, but he stopped fucking altogether.
The part of this that made me the most smug was that his fuck-buddy—the woman I will call Aniir who kept him from reconciling with me after our estrangement because she was profoundly jealous of me—kept calling him for hook-ups and he absolutely delighted in shooting her down. Prior to this, whenever she’d call him for a romp, he’d probably be DtF. Afterwards, she’d do the usual request and he’d just say “no.” And then after, he’d giggle to himself or to me about it.
This made me particularly happy because it was very obvious that, from the get-go, she considered him her property and did not like that I was taking him away from her, even though she didn’t actually want him. I’m not sure specifically why she wanted to have a hold on him. Perhaps it was because he was a more talented DJ than she was and she wanted to take advantage of him for the events she arranged. Maybe he was just good in bed. Either way, they had dated for a while the previous year and he made it clear that she didn’t treat him well, and it was still her that broke things off. Yet when I showed up on the scene, she suddenly offered him “girlfriend intimacy”… something that apparently wasn’t on the table when they were actually a couple. And she was rude AF to me and my partner when we met officially, and this was after meeting in passing several times, when she refused to even look at me. Red flags all around, and her true colors came out later. So I tried to keep my distaste to myself, but every time he rejected her sexual advances, I cackled like an evil witch from a children’s cartoon in my head.
Otso was such a fascinating person, really. For all the troubles and trials and traumas, he was so clever and weird and funny and cheeky. And the more time he spent with me, the more he seemed happy and inspired and the less he seemed dank and depressed. I told him things, he listened, adapted, changed, and tried his damned hardest every single time. And that is exactly why I was always so fucking proud of him. Because even if he was an enormous dummy on occasion, he was extraordinarily clever and self-aware of his problems and how they affected him. If I gave him a new perspective, he’d absorb it into himself and grow and evolve.
He was brilliant to watch and I loved every second of it. At least, before the estrangement, that is.
Thanks again for hearing his story. Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
