This blog is now ten years old!

When I originally started this blog as Shades of Gray in 2008, I really didn’t think it’d go anywhere. Asexuality was such a niche topic and people had been telling me, over and over again, that they didn’t care. I didn’t have anyone around me who was interested in listening. So I decided to just make a new space where I could write down my thoughts about it, anonymously. I started this at a time when I was going through a lot of processing, and I would have normally written all this stuff out in a private journal, but I decided to make it public instead, so that maybe one day my words would reach people.

I was surprised to see a handful of people engage with me from the very beginning. A bunch of other ace blogs started up around the same time, and then there was a second wave of new blogs, and then a third, and now there are so many I have no idea how you’d even figure out what constitutes a wave anymore.

This is what we’ve built together.

And we’ll keep building.

That’s what motivates me to keep coming back, even when I have to take long breaks. I know that we can make the future better, because I’ve already seen so much progress. There are a lot of areas where I feel stuck in my life, and when it comes to blogging and community-building I still keenly feel my limits, but seeing how much things have changed in the past ten years gives me hope.

So I want to take a moment to look back at the things I’ve written in the past ten years. I’m going to highlight one post from each year that either I like the best, feel is still relevant or important, or feel is interesting to compare to more recent writing.

• 2008: Positive Metaphors: Chandelier Culture
  • I’ve always liked this one.
• 2009: Romantic Initiatives 
  • …I realize that I really hate everything I wrote in 2009, it was not a good year for me. But this is the story of how I met my partner, written when we still considered our relationship romantic.  It did feel romantic at the time, but we could’ve avoided a lot of conflict by thinking about it differently.
• 2010: Victorian Sensibilities
  • Questioning the stereotypes about the Victorian era and whether it would really be more ace-friendly.
• 2011: Do you want to?
  • This one has unfortunately retained relevance and still gets linked every so often, but even so there has also been SO MUCH progress since I wrote this!!
• 2012: On “Better Half” – Gregory House is Not Infallible
  • Yeah, that happened.
• 2013: — hiatus year —
  • Wondering why I took a break? I explained that here.
• 2014: Permission
  • This is for everyone who has ever asked, “Do you think I could be asexual?”
• 2015: Updating the Map: Romantic Attraction and Friendship vs. Romance
  • Shifting from romantic to queerplatonic.
• 2016: The Healer Role
  • Video game metaphors, what’s not to like?
• 2017: Reflecting, Revising, Restructuring, Recovering
  • Last year was pretty much mostly a break year too, since I was dealing with so much burnout from politics and mental health shifts, so this one wins by default.
• 2018 (so far): Building a Mosaic From a Shattered Future
  • Obviously 2018 isn’t over yet so I’m not really picking a favorite from this year, but this post is particularly relevant as a retrospective over the past 10 years.

This year I’ve tried to make it a goal to post more often (when I can), and I’ve been going through my GIANT PILE OF DRAFTS and ideas that I once wrote down, getting some of them finished, and tossing the ones that aren’t relevant anymore. So while I don’t promise to be consistent, you can expect more from me in the future.

Thanks to everyone who has come along with me on this strange ride!