#grayasexuality

☆ Funtime Freddy + grayasexual + panromantic + aesthetic post ☆ Happy Pride Month! ☆

Welcome to November 2017′s Carnival of Aces! I’ll briefly get this out here, then I’ll explain what this is, then I’ll come back and reiterate the topic, but this month’s topic is: Questioning, Exploration, and Mislabeling.

So, never heard of a blog carnival? I hadn’t either until I volunteered to host a few months ago! A blog carnival is a blogging event where bloggers all write about a similar topic and the host collects all these posts for everyone’s reading consumption. This particular carnival is a recurring monthly asexual carnival originally started by Sciatrix and now overseen by The Asexual Agenda. Each month, a new blogger hosts and comes up with a new theme. You can find asexualagenda’s masterpost of what this carnival is and all the past events here: https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/a-carnival-of-aces-masterpost/ 

So this has been going on for more than five years now. Very impressive! I’ve actually heard of this carnival a couple of times over the years. Sadly, I never stopped to take the time to actually learn what it was so that I could participate. Hopefully some new people this month can be inspired to participate as I was! 

As I said, this has been going on for years now. So it can be or seem hard to come up with a creative/unique topic. I chose the topic Questioning, Exploration, and Mislabeling for several reasons. Before I get into that, I would also like to make a call for volunteers to host in 2018! It was a lot easier to come up with a topic than I thought it would be, but if you’re dissuaded due to coming up with a new topic, new people are hearing of this carnival all the time (I’m proof)! I’m sure you could recycle an old topic and get lots of new insights and answers. Simply go here and post that you’d be up for hosting and when you’d like to host! I haven’t even seen any responses to my topic yet, and I’m already excited to see what it will bring. I fully suggest trying out hosting! This is just a very cool way to remind yourself that you are a part of a community and that you are not alone.

That being said: Questioning, Exploration, and Mislabeling. I went with this topic because there’s a lot online right now about young people identifying as asexual and being piled on because they’re “too young to know they’re asexual” so they should wait before identifying as anything - even being told this by people who knew they were gay when they were five years old. Nevermind that someone could always use a different label later or their identity may be fluid. I also know it’s a common asexual experience to have identified as gay, never knowing that asexuality (or aromanticism or the split attraction model) was an option, just as many multiply-attracted people may have identified as gay/lesbian before realizing that the bpq labels were an option. I am a big fan of experimentation, myself, as it has been a big part of me discovering my own identity. This is something I’ve been discussing more and more with others recently, so I’d love to read what you all think!

Absolutely anything that you think of for the topic Questioning, Exploration, and Mislabeling is welcome! However, if you need some inspiration, here’s some things to think about (please note that when I say asexual, it means asexual and asexual spectrum):

How did you realize you were asexual? What made you realize you felt differently from others?

How many labels did you try out before settling on asexual/ace spectrum?

How long did you know you were asexual before finding the term asexual?

How or why did you decided to try or use the label asexual?

When did you know you were asexual? How did you accept this?

If you used other labels, why did you decide to use them? Why did you decide to stop using them (if you did)?

Were you in a romantic/sexual relationship before identifying as asexual? How did the relationship impact you?

Have you ever questioned if you were really asexual? What helped you feel validated?

If you used other labels, did they feel right? Did you just not know how they felt?

What sort of exploration did you do to realize or accept that you are asexual?

Did you do any exploration to try and convince yourself you weren’t asexual?

What made you question your assumed heterosexuality?

How long have you struggled with being asexual or using the asexual label?

Are there other parts of your identity that make identifying as asexual difficult or undesirable?

How old were you when you learned the term asexual? How old were you when you identified as asexual? How old do you think you might have identified as asexual if you’d known about the term earlier?

Do you identify as asexual but feel more comfortable using a different label when people ask?

What advice would you give to young asexuals or young folk questioning their identity?

Participating is simple! Whatever your blogging platform, simply make a post for your response to the topic Questioning, Exploration, and Mislabeling and then submit your post link to me by November 30th (or let me know that you have a post idea or in the works but will need some extra time to finish it)! You do not have to have a tumblr account to submit to me! If you are not on any blogging platform, you can also write up your response in my submit box. Just make sure you put in whatever name you want to be referred to by in the Name box, and I will post it for you here on my blog with credits to you!

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask (anon is turned on). At the end of the month, I will release a post with links to everyone’s responses so you can all read each other’s thoughts and experiences. I hope that this will allow some of us to air our insecurities, find some validation either by airing our thoughts or by realizing we’re not alone, and allow us to either make some new friends or simply come together more as a community. <3

~Sock

If a grayasexual demiromantic person attracted to the opposite gender only stops calling themselves that, and continues to be...attracted to people less often than the median world average of attraction and doesn’t fall in love until they get to know someone, and acts accordingly...