It’s been far too long since I last participated in the Carnival of Aces (you can find my previous submissions all here, though!). The fact that my life has just been in a very happy, sustainable place has meant I’ve stopped doing as much deep introspection on my ace-ness, I guess. I already talked about how the same thing has happened to my drive to talk about my gender as well…
Anyway, I have something today on this month’s topic, so let’s do it!
This month the theme is “Conscious and Unconscious Difference“, which raises the question for me: how has becoming conscious of your ace identity changed your life/choices/etc?
For me, this has been pretty straight-forward: understanding myself as demisexual has allowed me to stop feeling like I was doing something “wrong” because I so rarely felt a spark when I tried dating people. I used to push myself too hard to try to force connections that just weren’t there for me, and that wasn’t fair to me or the people I was seeing.
There were other factors exacerbating the issue at the time that I maybe won’t go into today, but basically I would look around at other people in my life happily casually dating and wonder why it didn’t work for me. It was very freeing to decide that ‘it doesn’t work for me because that’s not how it works for me’ was a good enough reason in and of itself!
I’m the same person I was before making that realization but now I don’t try to fit myself into relationships/dating models that aren’t right for me. It’s all good.
Valprehension 