Squeezy-cheez The Greatest Factor For Me Has Been The Consistency Of My Experience. I Spent Years Deeply

squeezy-cheez The greatest factor for me has been the consistency of my experience. I spent years deeply confused about what I was feeling. At first I thought I was a late bloomer. Then I thought I was homosexual, because I think a lot of women are beautiful. Then I thought I was straight, because men are gorgeous. But during conversations about sex I was firmly not interested. I've repeated my disinterest over and over again in conversations and journaling through the years. And this was long before I knew and used the term asexual. I was talking with my cousin over coffee one night. We were discussing her new boyfriend and so forth. I confessed that I was a virgin; she was a little shocked and asked why. I told her I wasn't interested. She said that maybe I was asexual, it was something that had come up in her human sexuality course. I remember the next day I sat down and researched asexuality. I cried. No label has ever given me so much relief. This thing I was internally agonizing over for years had a name. I don't really think about sex on my own, the subject typically has to be brought to my attention. When the conversation does get going I feel so abnormal and uncomfortable. I feel broken almost every time. I struggle all the time with who I am. I worried, like you, that I was making it all up in my head. But the history of my experience is there. And most importantly, when I identified as asexual nothing about my experiencs changed, except that nowadays I am on average happier.

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let-me-be-ace

9 years ago

well put

It’s often really hard to imagine or empathize with experiences outside of your own, which is why most often the people who head up movements or charities for particular issues have had some personal experience with it, and why it’s really hard for privileged people to understand systematic oppression etc.

I feel like that’s also why so many ace/aro spectrum people don’t realise that they’re ace/aro for a long time, because they honestly don’t know they’re any different to everyone else. Usually, I’ve found, this manifests in one of two ways - we assume that everyone else is like us (ie nobody actually experiences sexual attraction, nobody actually falls in love like they do in movies and it’s all some collective delusion or joke), or we assume that we’re like everyone else (ie thinking what we’re feeling must be sexual/romantic attraction because that’s how we’ve been taught to quantify our feelings and experiences).

With asexuality, I spent most of my life mistaking aesthetic (and the occasional sensual) attraction for sexual, which is why I didn’t realise I was asexual until I was 19. With aromanticism, for me, it was a combination of both; assuming all feelings I had towards any boy ever must be romantic, but finding some forms of ‘love’ completely implausible and genuinely totally unfathomable.

And that’s totally fine. Having a new word in your vocabulary may completely change the way you view yourself and may even shift your entire worldview because you have a new way to quantify your and other people’s experiences.

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let-me-be-ace

9 years ago