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
Hello everyone! Welcome to the May 2018 Carnival of Aces!
This is a monthly blogging carnival, a long-running event organized by The Asexual Agenda to spur discussion among asexual and ace-spectrum people. Each month, a volunteer host sets out a topic for discussion, collects responses, and posts links to all of the responses at the end of the month. Anyone can participate, and I’ll have further details about how to participate below. If you’d like to volunteer to host a future month, please check out the Carnival of Aces Masterpost for instructions.
Last month, the Carnival was hosted at Demisexual and Proud, and the topic was inspired by a very old Flemish-Dutch saying, “All the birds have begun nests except me and you, what are we still waiting for?” Please check out the responses at the round-up post!
This month’s theme is…
Asexuality is a complex topic, and often difficult for people to understand. Because of this, we sometimes have a tendency to elide nuances about our experiences in an effort to explain simply enough that others can understand. This month, I want us to focus on those things that we tend to avoid talking about, for fear of being misunderstood, or anything that we may have felt we can’t quite (openly) articulate.
Sometimes, people accuse aces of overthinking things or “making everything too complicated,” without having any understanding of why we talk about things the way that we do. I think that from the beginning, the ace blogging community has had a lot of focus on exploring complexity and nuance, and a lot of previous topics for the Carnival of Aces also apply here. But instead of focusing on complexity/nuance of just one topic, like identity or labels/models (which have been chosen multiple times), this gives people the freedom to choose whatever kind of complexities they’re interested in discussing, or zoom way out and analyze the ace community itself. So it’s kind of a meta topic.
Here are some prompts to get you started:
Please feel free to submit anything else you can think of that addresses nuance or complexity and asexuality.
That’s it! Let me know if you have any questions.
Remember, the deadline for submissions is May 31st, 2018. The round-up post will be scheduled to go up on June 1st at 10 a.m. EST. Late posts will still be accepted in June, and edited into the post as they come in.
I look forward to seeing what people have to say!
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
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
This post is for the July 2017 Carnival of Aces, the topic of which is “Ace-ing it up offline.” It has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
I live in an area with very little (visible) ace presence. Although I have met other ace people around me, and I know there must be more I haven’t met yet, there is no real local community here, so my opportunities for meeting other aces have mostly been limited to a few short periods of searching online sites like Acebook and OKCupid, and pure coincidence. So far, the handful of meetings I have managed have only ever yielded shallow connections, as most of the aces I’ve met in person have ended up moving away less than a year after I met them (or after they came out to me as ace), as younger people in my area tend to do.
To date, past attempts to start ace meetup groups in this area have all ultimately fizzled out. Meetups in general just don’t tend to work out too well here, because the people who might attend are so spread out that any attempt to make a group is definitely going to inconvenience someone. Some of the people who want to attend live several hours away. There just isn’t a large enough, or connected enough, population to support a regular ace meetup group here. Continue reading
Cross-posted to Asexual Agenda.
This post is the first in a series of rants about blogging, wherein I try to help other would-be writers join the ace blogosphere. Please view the masterpost here.
Prismatic Entanglements 