ever since you left cloud city luuuke

Amandla Stenberg at the Met Gala shot for Tumblr

#let finn be a force sensitive woodland prince tbh

even if you find that life’s not fair, it

whenever a senior woman with gray/silver/white hair sits in my chair i always tell her it’s lovely (which it is!) and i’ve had numerous conversations with elderly women about how their hair color is “popular with the young folks these days!”

one woman with white hair said to me before that she’s been getting a lot more compliments about her hair from people my age (i’m in my twenties) and that it’s made her feel so good about “the hair that god gave her”. a few other older women have joked that the kids these days only wish they could have colored hair “as beautiful as [their] natural hair!”

I’m on the Ace spectrum. For sure. I don’t think I can classify myself as 100% asexual, because that would feel like shutting the door on something that I might potentially feel in the future, and nobody can predict the future. So for the moment, I call myself demisexual, because I feel like it leaves that door open.

Anyway, it is only in the past 12 months that I have come to this realisation. Before, I was just sure there was something wrong with me. It was nice to discover that maybe there isn’t. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I’ve noticed a lot of stigma against people on the ace spectrum. Some say they don’t belong in the queer community. Others diminish their feelings or experiences. It’s quite heartbreaking to see. But I just want to say the main problem I have with my sexuality that I really, really hate. The loneliness.

Since I finished school, all of the people who I called my close fiends inevitably found partners. This is great and I’m happy for them. I’m alone. I have friends, yes, but there is something hugely different between being somebody’s friend, and being the most important person in somebody’s life. I don’t think I’ll ever get that, but I see it in other’s around me - I’m like an outsider drinking in the happiness that they get through another, and it’s just intangible.

I struggle to build a social life around me to help fill that gap with friends, because all of my coworkers have partners and/or children, so the crap evening teaching hours and summer supervision gets lumped on my workload, because it doesn’t impact anyone else. These hours of teaching have to go to somebody, and they might as well get given to the person with no other obligations. So I work late and mark late and don’t have a summer and then come home to a lonely house, purely because it’s a lonely house.

I don’t feel like I can be myself at work or with friends, because at some point, a conversation will get sexualised and I genuinely do not understand nor can empathise or offer my opinion because it is alien. So I get lonely in a group, lonely surrounded by others, lonely when I get home. It’s a very isolating existence.

Even if you research sexual orientation, most journal articles state “very little research has been conducted on asexuality” or “information on asexuality is lacking”. This is despite the fact that around 1% of the population report being on the asexual spectrum - that’s around 647160 people in the UK alone. 

Add that onto reading stuff about not belonging to the one community who I feel more a part of than any other, and I think you might understand why ace people may get quite defensive. It’s why I’m saying this today, even though I’m generally a closed off person who doesn’t like sprouting her opinions. It’s why even though I identify as being on the ace spectrum, I hate this about me. It’s why I really with there *was* something wrong with me, so it could be changed.