#manage your relationship to spec is what i guess i'm trying to say

[leothil]

Absolutely no hate towards people engaging in wild spec, but some of it is starting to remind me of johnlock levels of reaching, and I'd very seriously caution people against becoming too attached to your own wild spec, because we've seen too many times already how people take out the disappointment that the scenario they made up in their head didn't happen on the showrunners, actors, and other people in the fandom.

[dsudis]

i wanted to ask, since you're pretty open and proud about it, how you got to be that way about your asexuality? i very recently discovered i'm gray ace. i can say without a doubt the people on this hellsite spouting garbage about asexuality definitely made me not think about or even want to consider being on the ace spectrum for a very long time. i'm also demiromantic, and people's garbage about the aro spec is almost worse. i'm dealing with a lot of anxiety about it right now + could use help.

Hiiii! I think you sent an earlier version of this same question a while ago, and I’m sorry I didn’t respond sooner. I’ve been trying and trying to formulate a good answer, but I don’t know that I have one, or not one that is helpful for anyone else. But here goes?

I figured out my asexuality via a) a tumblr post that explained what asexuality is and b) knowing another person via tumblr and fandom who was asexual. And that was in late 2013, which were apparently halcyon days of people being slightly less aggressively shitty on tumblr, or something? But tumblr was always the place I felt most comfortable talking about being ace, and is definitely the only place I talk about it as much as I do here.

I’ve come out as ace to a really limited number of people in real life because, you know, explaining that you’re asexual to a person who doesn’t know what that means puts you about three conversational turns away from talking about your masturbatory habits. That is not, to put it mildly, the kind of relationship I have with my mom, or my even-numbered brothers, or coworkers or extended family members. (I did come out more widely as dating a woman, which I started doing shortly after figuring out my asexuality and realizing that my girl crushes were preeeeetty much identical to my guy crushes in that I didn’t actually want to kiss any of them. That went badly enough with my mom that I really, really don’t see a need to explain anything else to her ever.)

The other thing is that, when I read that tumblr post and started dating that woman and all that, I was already 32 years old, and I’m going to take a wild guess that you are... younger than that. And there’s nothing wrong with being younger and figuring this stuff out--God knows my automatic answer to every if you could tell your younger self one thing hypothetical is the definition of asexuality--but I was already a fair way along the curve of Not Giving A Fuck What Anybody Else Thinks About Who I Am when I figured this out. Five and a half years later, I am further still beyond caring what any teenaged asshole on some website thinks, and have even managed to stop visiting that anonmeme frequented by the person who felt that my fic clearly proved that I was making up my asexuality for ??all the social cachet??

I was also not one of those aces whose reaction was “oh thank god I can stop having sex” but rather “aw dammit I’m never going to want to have sex.” So I’d already spent my entire adult life being mostly single and failing to do all those relationship things everyone around me was doing, and dealing with being judged about that. Finding out that that was about who I am and what I want and don’t want, rather than some failing on my part to be or do what I was supposed to, when it just seemed to happen for everyone else, was a relief and a vindication. 

(I mean, eventually. Not gonna lie, the day I figured it out ended with me wandering around in the dark crying while trying to find someplace to eat sufficiently comforting food to cope with that particular emotional earthquake. But it got better. I got better.)

So, yeah, there’s no magic bullet I can offer you--it just takes time and growing into yourself and your own understanding of who you are and what that means and how welcome everyone on the internet who knows nothing about you is to fuck the entire way off. It helps to find the people you can tell, even if you have to do some explaining about it, so that you have some positive voices around you; if I can be one, even as some stranger on the internet, I’m glad to. Hang in there, ace.