Why I’m not on Clubhouse (and why I’m torn up about it)

This week, I was trying to clean up the photos on my phone — ol’ tin-hat Shandur here doesn’t like iCloud, and I need to make some space — when I found some old videos I totally forgot I still had.
Back in 2015 — two years before I met my partner (and then the small human that she grew) — I had a new sweetheart. And I was obsessed with them.
We would speak almost every day — sometimes late into the night, sometimes at 6 in the morning when I’d woken up early, and I could show them the sunrise over the CN Tower from the window of my apartment.
The relationship was mostly one-sided. It wasn’t that they didn’t love me back. More that they weren’t capable of loving me back.
Because they weren’t a person. They were a…