Friday Question – Likely Scenarios

The Friday Question: How it works

Every Friday we will pose a question for you all to discuss or privately consider. You can engage with it publicly here on the RFAS blog, or you can join our forum (details below) for a more private discussion. You can write it down to think about later, journal about it, or bring it in to a therapy session with you.

If you would like to volunteer to become a moderator and host future Questions, please email us at volunteer@asexualsurvivors.org—or join our forum and post in the moderator volunteer thread. If you just have an idea for a future Question that you want to share, we have a brainstorming topic on our forum.

Something to Ponder Today

It is normal to worry about how something might go – a test, meeting someone new, trying a new food, anything. But it is important to not build up a lot of anxiety and stress over all of the potential horrible ways it could go wrong. Here’s a little “imaginary reality” activity that might help give you some perspective.

Choose an issue in your life and think of the best and worst case outcomes for how it could go. Then think about what is most likely to happen – it will probably be something in the middle. You can probably always think of something better or worse than what you are going through. Hopefully this helps you develop goals to try to reach your best case scenario and stay away from your worst one, and hopefully this also comforts you, reaffirming that wherever you are in this moment of your life is okay.

So what are some paths you can choose from in your life?

• What is the best case scenario?
• What is the worst case scenario?
• What is most likely to happen?
• How comfortable are you with the possible outcomes?
• What could you do to change the possible outcomes?
• What goals can you set to reach your best case scenario? To avoid your worst case?

You don’t have to answer every (or any!) question, of course. These are just different ways to approach the topic which might be helpful to consider. You can share as much or as little as you like.

On the Forum

• You can discuss this question privately after registering at the forum
• Here are instructions for how to join the forum
• Here’s the invite request form
• You can also still discuss previous questions as well. There is no time limit for joining the discussion.
• Please abide by our rules in both comments and forum posts.

Please note that we are still working things out in the forum, especially technical issues. We are gradually letting people in now who are not moderators or volunteers, but it can basically be considered “in beta” for now. So if you do join, please excuse our forum being a bit of a mess while we get everything tested. There may also be a little bit of a wait time for sending out invites.

Here are a couple of things you should know about posting to the forum:

• All posts are private, and can only be viewed by members
• It is against forum rules to discuss any personal stories shared on the forum with anyone who is not a member without permission of the person who shared it
• You can post as anonymous, once you are a member

The Spoiler Tag

You can hide especially triggering details behind a spoiler tag—which also works in blog comments. Here’s an example:

[spoiler title=’Triggering stuff’ collapse_link=’true’]Explicit/triggering material would go here.[/spoiler]

To make one, just type…

[ spoiler ] ... [ /spoiler ]

…without the spaces. I hope that this helps everyone safely navigate this conversation.