This is a post for the August 2020 Carnival of Aces. It is cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
What am I hoping to get out of the ace community?
In a word, accessibility. I mean that in a broad sense: accessibility in terms of consideration for physical disabilities, accessibility of information, and accessibility in terms of creating an environment that doesn’t feel hostile, where I feel safe and welcome to share the truth of my experience. Continue reading
This post is for the April 2018 Carnival of Aces (“All the birds but us…”). Cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
Content Note: contains a brief mention of sexual assault, and discussion of the impact of trauma on relationships.
The question for this month is, “How did your (a)sexual and (a)romantic orientations impact your (expected or imagined) future?”
When I was a child, honestly, I didn’t really have an expected or imagined future. I didn’t know “what I wanted to be” when I grew up, and I found the question so obnoxious that I started to routinely protest it by giving an impossible answer. (“A cat!”—because nobody ever asks cats that kind of question.) Continue reading
Ace readers, prepare to cringe. Consider this a blanket trigger warning for the rest of this post and most of the links. To my fellow ace survivors, I hope you are taking care of yourselves, and please don’t feel that you have to engage with this.
Teen Vogue published an article by Jaclyn Friedman entitled “Why Sexual Pleasure Must Be Included in #MeToo Conversations” — and of course it has the tagline, “Let’s refuse to be silenced about our sexualities, and celebrate them instead.”
Okay, fine, let’s do that. I’m refusing to be silent about my sexuality.
I am asexual. Continue reading
[Content note: All the trigger warnings for this post. However, the worst part is front-loaded, and brief.] Continue reading
This post is for the March 2018 Carnival of Aces on the topic of “Physical Health and/or Our Bodies.”
I don’t talk about my body much. I tend to think that people don’t want to hear it, and that the world needs more body positivity rather than contagious insecurity, especially coming from someone of average weight and relative privilege. But not talking about these things doesn’t make them go away, so for this one little post, since it’s on-topic, I’m going to try to stop ignoring my discomfort and examine it for a little while.
Fair warning: it’s mostly trauma and aging-related stuff, with some mention of racism. I’m not getting into weight or diets or anything like that, though.
Feel free to tune out now, but listen in if you want. Maybe a few people will find this relatable. Continue reading
This post is for the January 2018 Carnival of Aces, on the topic of “Identity.”
This is going to be completely off-the-cuff rambling, so bear with me if you will. There’s some stuff that I’m trying to get at that is very difficult to describe, so I’m doing it in a roundabout way. I’m also barely editing this post before I publish it, because I tried writing about this before and then scrapped the entire draft last minute because I didn’t like how it was going. Instead, I’m just going to do a “thinking out loud” style post.
I don’t really like writing about (my own) identity.
There. I said it.
Maybe that’s surprising to you, I don’t know. Maybe not. It seems like it might be surprising to some, considering that the entire reason I started this blog was to discuss a particular identity, asexuality—and more specifically, gray-asexuality, which I no longer identify with. There, I suppose, is part of the reason I don’t like talking about identity. When you’ve come to be known for having a particular identity, and then that changes? Well… Continue reading
I’ve been reflecting back on my hard-won personal progress of the past year and making notes about what’s working best for me now, so that I can come back to this post in the future and remind myself of these strategies when I need to. Continue reading
Let’s be real: 2017 was a bullet-hellscape full of dumpster fires orchestrated by a cartoonishly evil rich white predator, surrounded by a bunch of rampaging swamp monsters spewing corrosive acid at the foundations of democracy and decency. This state of affairs is not normal.
We all know this. But this post is not about politics. I’m not going to let the bitter, caustic acid of hatred and bigotry we’ve had to endure all year be the focus of this post.
Instead, as the year draws to a close, I’m looking back on it intentionally with an eye towards what progress I’ve made, in my own personal life, so that I can take from it what lessons I’ve learned and apply those toward the future. Because I’m definitely going to need them. There’s a long, hard road ahead and many more battles to fight.
[Content note: So this is a pretty personal post and usually, I would put some content warnings right here, but honestly, I’m not really sure what to warn for in this one. It’s mostly a very general discussion of PTSD/trauma symptoms, with mentions of abuse, and some discussion of lack of access to medical treatments and med-shaming. But I’m actively avoiding getting specific. If you see something else I should warn for, please let me know.]
This (slightly late) post is for the February 2017 Carnival of Aces on Resistance, Activism, and Self-Care. Cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
Content warnings: familial rejection, trauma, emotional abuse, anti-PTSD ableism and victim-blaming, bad therapists and lack of access to therapy, anti-atheist microaggressions, mentions of death Continue reading
on RFAS’s “Asexuality & Mental Health” page (not linked because c’mon) that says PLEASE DO NOT LINK THIS PAGE DURING AN ARGUMENT and yet people are still doing it.
If you link to us in order to argue on tumblr about whether aces count as “oppressed enough” to be included in any LGBTQ spaces (or acephobia or anything else), you will cause a wave of hostile traffic to a website specifically set up to support ace survivors. If you reblog an argument that contains such a link, the effect is the same.
Our bandwidth is NOT FREE. And there is an emotional cost to survivors when you decide to use our stories to win political points.
Ace survivors are not rhetorical devices. Mentally ill aces are not “receipts of oppression.” We are not sad puppies or oppressed lamps, and we are not your ultimate trump card. We are people. We have agency. And we are right here. We’re part of your community. We see what you are doing.
If you are going to engage with detractors, or “Discoursers” or whatever they’re being called by the time you read this, you DO NOT have permission to pull someone else into your argument. If you want to use someone else’s story as an example, YOU NEED TO GET PERMISSION FIRST. That is how consent works. If you circulate someone’s story without asking, you are non-consensually exposing them to a serious risk of harassment. Even if no direct harassment occurs (or can occur, because the person may have shared anonymously), just being exposed to the argument, especially when those involved have shown a disregard for your consent and your safety, is INCREDIBLY triggering and anxiety-provoking.
And there is splash damage to other survivors and mentally ill aces, including those of us who volunteer at Resources for Ace Survivors to help fellow survivors. You tax our emotional resources, and make it so that we are less able to help each other, because we have less energy to engage. And you make other survivors & mentally ill aces witnessing the argument feel LESS SAFE sharing their stories.
These kinds of arguments may make survivors and mentally ill aces feel too unsafe to even participate in the community at all. I have personally already withdrawn from the ace community for a few years because I did not feel safe enough to keep participating!
So if you do this, or if you reblog someone else who has done this, you are directly contributing to further harm of ace survivors and mentally ill aces.
Please, please STOP.
And look, I realize that a lot of you doing this are young and have never thought about this before. I get that. I’m sure you didn’t intend to harm anyone. But that still doesn’t erase the fact that it does harm people.
And I’m exasperated, because gentle reminders haven’t had much of an effect. I don’t know what will reach people. Please feel free to circulate the full text of this post on tumblr, because I am not connected enough there to make a dent myself.
Prismatic Entanglements 