"Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself."

-bell hooks

You are smart. Not just in obvious ways, but in the quiet ways too. In how you think, how you notice things, how you keep trying even when it’s hard.

You are amazing. Not because you are perfect, but because you keep going, you keep feeling, you keep showing up in your own way. That counts more than you think.

You are not a problem. You are not “too much,” not “too sensitive,” not something that needs to be fixed to be acceptable. You’re a person who has been through things, who feels deeply, who is still learning and growing.

You are not boring. You are thoughtful, and there is depth to you that not everyone takes the time to see.

You are not annoying. You are expressive, you care, and your presence has a place in this world.

You are not replaceable. The way you think, the way you exist, the way you show up, no one else does it the same way.

You are not a burden. Needing support sometimes doesn’t make you heavy to carry. It makes you human.

You are not behind. You are moving at a pace that fits what you’ve been through, even if it doesn’t match others.

You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to exist without constantly apologizing for it.

You are not less than anyone else. You are not failing at being a person.

And even if it doesn’t feel true right now, even if your mind argues with every word… you still deserve to hear it.

So I’ll say it again, just in case you needed it a little more today.

Most fan fic writers wish they could get more readers. But think about it. Out of all the fics in your fandom, your readers chose to read yours in their limited time. My medium-sized fandom has over 94K works on AO3. If only 50 people read one of my works, that means that 50 people chose my story out of thousands of others they could have read instead. Hits a little differently than "only 50 people read my fic," doesn't it?

but to be aroace is not to exist in a vacuum. it is not a hollowing-out of the self, nor a failure to arrive at some universal human endpoint. rather, it is an alternative orientation toward intimacy, attachment, and meaning—one that exposes, quite inconveniently, the extent to which our cultural narratives have overprivileged romance and sex as the central axes around which a life must turn.

we are taught, over and over again, that love (by which is almost always meant romantic love) is the highest form of connection, the ultimate telos of human existence. entire genres, entire mythologies, are built upon this premise. to deviate from it is treated not as divergence but as error—something to be explained away, corrected, or, at best, politely misunderstood.

what does it mean, for instance, to take seriously the idea that friendship is not a precursor to something else, not a lesser form of love waiting to be upgraded, but a complete and sufficient mode of relationality in its own right? what does it mean to decenter the couple—to refuse the hierarchy that places romantic partnership at the pinnacle and relegates all other bonds to the periphery?

aroace existence, simply by being, asks these questions.

it also reveals how much of what is considered “natural” is, in fact, deeply constructed. amatonormativity—the assumption that everyone both desires and should desire a monogamous romantic partnership—is so pervasive that its absence is often read as incomprehensible. people reach, reflexively, for explanations: trauma, repression, immaturity, a phase. anything but the possibility that this, too, is a valid and coherent way of being.

there is a subtle violence in that refusal. not always overt, not always malicious, but insistent nonetheless. it manifests in the constant probing (“are you sure?”), in the pathologizing (“maybe you just haven’t met the right person”), in the quiet erasure of narratives that do not center romance or sex. it is the violence of being rendered unintelligible within the dominant discourse.

and still—aroace people build lives.

lives full of attachment, of care, of chosen commitments that do not neatly map onto the categories provided for them. queerplatonic relationships, deeply invested friendships, familial bonds reimagined and reconstituted—these are not substitutes for something else, not placeholders for a “real” relationship that has yet to arrive. they are, in themselves, real.

perhaps what unsettles people is not the absence of attraction, but the implications of that absence. if a person can live fully, meaningfully, without romance or sex as central organizing principles, then what does that say about the supposed universality of those experiences? what does it reveal about the structures we have built—social, economic, emotional—around the assumption that everyone is moving toward the same end?

to take aroace lives seriously would require a reorientation that many are unwilling to undertake. it would mean valuing forms of intimacy that are currently marginalized, questioning the primacy of the couple, and acknowledging that there is no singular blueprint for a fulfilling life.

so instead, the easier route is taken: misunderstanding, minimization, erasure.

but the thing about erasure is that it never fully succeeds. people continue to name themselves, to articulate their experiences, to carve out spaces—however small—in which they are legible to one another, if not to the wider world.

and in doing so, they do more than simply assert their own existence. they expand the possibilities of what existence can look like.

to be aroace, then, is not merely to lack something. it is to inhabit a different configuration of being—one that, if we were willing to listen, might teach us that the architectures of love and connection are far more varied than we have been led to believe.

And I wanna say, before I get into it? The number of people who have that thought and are right? Nonexistent. I've never seen it happen. I'm sure it's a possibility, an edge case, but I've never seen it myself, and we talk to lots of queer and plural folks.

And we've thought about that fear, that worry a lot. After much thought, we've kinda rewritten that one for ourselves. Because firstly, we noticed that the "I feel like I'm faking it" feeling is practically identical for being plural as it is for being trans. They're the same feeling. I'm certain they're likely similar or the same for most queer and likely many neurodivergent folks.

We thought about it some and we've mostly come to the conclusion that... it's not really a doubt, exactly.

It seems, to us, to be a specific presentation of the feeling of being unsafe, insecure, and a worry that you won't be accepted as you are. Because someone not accepting your identity is someone not accepting you as a person (or people, heh), and that's quite a scary possibility.