I’ve seen a lot of posts by other asexual people about how they grew up thinking there was something horribly wrong with them, that they had some weird condition that no one else had ever experienced, and then one day they found out about asexuality and breathed a huge sigh of relief. And that’s definitely a story worth telling, but I want to make a post about the opposite experience–that is, assuming you’re “normal” and then having your world knocked off its orbit by the revelation that you’re lowkey probably on the ace spectrum.
See, I love the idea of romance. It was always my favorite part of every book and movie when I was a kid. I daydreamed constantly, and I liked looking at boys, but the desire ended there. When I got older, I thought I wanted sex, because it seemed like the natural extension of the things I liked to daydream about, but I spent very little time actually having sexual thoughts or desires. I “wanted” sex in a vague, distant, hyper-idealized kind of way, and I always just sort of assumed that everyone else felt the same way I did. And for a long time, that idea went unchallenged. When I was in high school, sex was still sort of a taboo, whisper-and-giggle subject for most of my peers, and since no one ever told me exactly what sexual desire was supposed to feel like, I assumed we were feeling the same thing.
But then, when I got to college, all the social barriers against sex were gone. I was surrounded by horny 18-year-olds who had been dropped in the middle of a huge campus where no one cared what they did, where they could do whatever they wanted, and they wanted to fuck. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who were being very straightforward about their sexual desires. I learned that for them, sexual desire was a direct, immediate, physical thing, rather than a vague idea that they thought about sometimes but never felt the need to act on. That was when I first began to suspect that I wasn’t feeling the same things everyone else was feeling. And then, as I started to interrogate that idea further, I realized that I’d never really wanted sex that badly at all–I just thought that sex was necessary to obtain the things I did want (namely, closeness, validation, and acceptance from men).
Realizing that I was on the ace spectrum was not a happy revelation. As dramatic as it sounds, I kind of felt like my life was a lie. I spent my whole life thinking I was “normal,” only to found out I was actually part of a group that comprises about 1% of the global population. My feelings, which I had assumed were universal, were actually borderline incomprehensible to a decent chunk of people--to the point where I have to write a novel-length tumblr post to adequately explain my point of view. It felt like having a rug pulled out from under me.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. Finding out that I’m a-spec was a fairly recent development, and I’m still kind of deciding how I feel about it. But if anyone else reads this and relates to it, I hope it made you feel a little better.
Much love, and happy (belated) ace day.
💜
