sometimes i think about the early days of me identifying as aro, and often i try hard not to preach about The Old Days because it’s not like they were better, but i think for a lot of people newer to the community it’s not always clear how surreal the past few years have been for me and many others.
i’m NOT that old. i’m only in my 20s and i’ve known i was aroace for less than ten years. but sometimes even that is enough to make me feel ancient. i remember when there were just, basically no dedicated aro spaces. very few aro blogs on tumblr. impossible to find aro merch, barely any aro creators on youtube and the like. we hadn’t even unified around the current flag yet, in fact we were a couple iterations behind. ace stuff too, there were a lot more ace blogs and youtubers etc. than aro ones, and AVEN was already a long-standing thing, but still far less than there is now.
i’m sure if i was a bit more persistent and a lot less 15 and scared i could have found more out there, but the point stands that aro communities in 2014 were extremely insular. offline, i was the only aro person i knew, and i was deep in the closet. i only learned about being aro by accident, and i had to navigate it on my own. it took me more than a year to actually say it out loud, to myself in the mirror, because i couldn’t externalize it. there was never a moment of relief at realizing who i was. it was a dawning understanding of something i always knew, and then it became my deepest secret, because there was nobody i could tell who’d understand. i didn’t make aro friends online until much later.
the aspec community online, on tumblr especially, was decimated in those intervening years, and i had the “benefit” of already being closeted during those times, so i avoided the worst of the harassment that people who were openly aspec online were getting. but it did push me further into the closet and leave me with significant issues. but then, things got a little better. aro blogs started popping up. in fact, i won’t name names because i’ll embarass us all but if you’re seeing this and you ran an aro blog in 2017ish, thank you, because you are literally the reason i decided it was safe to be openly aspec on tumblr again, and here i am.
of course, nothing is ever perfect. every community has both internal and external problems, and we’re still working on ours. we’ve got a lot to fight for. and every time i think about all the culture and terminology we lost in the mid 2010s, i do get a little sad. but during pride month this year, i drove past a storefront that had pride flags painted in the window, and i almost started crying on the bus, because one of them was an aro flag. it was the first time i’d ever seen an aro flag in person that i didn’t own.
for me, being aro was very isolating for years and sometimes still is. it’s surreal (in a good way!) when i hear that kids now have multiple out aro friends irl, because it was only ever just me. but i think about myself as a young teenager, alone trying to string together an aro pride bracelet for myself in my bedroom, and to have known that in 8 years i’d be out, i’d have a community, i’d cry on public transit during pride month… well, i just wouldn’t have believed it at all.
