Writing ace-spectrum characters in fanfic, and Which part of my experiences are my asexuality?

This is my submission for the March 2015 Carnival of Aces, which had the topic “Writing About Asexuality“. Details are in the call for submissions here, and once the round-up of all submissions is posted, I’ll edit this blog post of mine to include a link to it so that you can read all of the wonderful things people have written this month that relates to this topic.

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I’ve been blogging about asexuality for over a year now, and I’ve also written a couple fanfiction things with fictional asexuality mentions/ace characters, and am working on a more massive ace fanfic project right now as well.

I’ve found that writing about asexuality certainly comes with an array of challenges.

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I want to blog about abuse… but I don’t know where to begin.

I’ve been reading a lot about various types of abuse lately. I am in the mood to write some sort of blog post to put on my blog here addressing some of these issues… but I don’t know where to begin or what the real topic of my post would be. 😛 I want to write about some of my very specific experiences being abused as a child by my mother. I want to write more theoretically and philosophically about power and abuse cycles and what we need to do to protect all people from all sorts of types of abuse. I want to write about victim blaming in cases like my own. I want to write about the complexity of my dad being a victim of my mother’s abuse, even after he’d been separated and essentially “common law” divorced from her for over a decade! I want to talk about specific types of abusive actions. I want to talk specifically about cluster B personality disorders like NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) in many abusive people, and I want to better understand so many of these issues. I want to talk about reading these non-fiction books that have flaws – flaws of sexism or assumptions of not-even-studied hypotheses being treated as likely true. I want to talk about statistics and how flawed and misleading they can be, and how difficult it is to make sense of these things. I want to talk about how the US court system is ill-equipped to handle abuse, but I’d be so out of my depth that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I want to talk about how my experience as a survivor of abuse has affected my life, my desires, my choices, who I am as a person today, but I feel like my experiences were much too minor compared to the horror stories I read about, and I’m not even sure the abuse I faced did damage me much in the long run. I want to do something tangible in the world to help children who are being abused the way I was, and of course all of the people abused in much worse ways too, and I don’t even know where to begin.

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FYI, on tumblr, I got a reply to my thoughts here, and then I answered my tumblr fandom friend’s comments:

k8video​ said: I think its best to start from the beginning and build up from there. Find a way to link each topic within the topic and create chapters/posts that flow from the last. Maybe create a flow chart – if that makes sense? Interested to see what you write.

luvtheheaven​ replied: Thanks!! 😉 I really appreciate the encouragement and knowing that I’ll have at least 1 reader… 😛 I think that is a good idea… I’ll see what I can do. I have an ace meetup event to go to all day today lol but maybe within the next few days I can find time to come up with a plan. Just outline a bunch of different blog posts I want to do eventually, then decide on an order and a way to sensibly tie them all together.

Being newly closeted because I’m in a new environment

I don’t really want to be overly specific, but basically, I started volunteer working somewhere, so my “co-workers” (who are all volunteers too, it’s a completely volunteer situation) are all sort of more casual and like new acquaintances/friends, but most of them are significantly older than me, and I feel very awkward about being asexual, all of a sudden.

I’ve been quite open about my asexual status within the past year-and-a-half, to most people, especially people I like and trust as friends.

But I want my co-workers to respect me, so I don’t want to bring up my asexuality, just in case they judge me in any of a number of ways.

I’ve been, however, growing increasingly aware of how uncomfortably back in the closet I’m beginning to feel. I feel like I’m hiding somewhere. What my sexual orientation is shouldn’t be relevant to my job, but because of the very friendly and social environment this new volunteer job has created, it feels like it is relevant, like when people talk casually about their heterosexual marriages and children, I should be able to talk about my life too.

And the crazy thing is, I have good reason to believe these people might all be understanding and accepting and fine with it if I came out. I just… don’t know. I have no clue. Their average age, especially, is what is making me extra uncomfortable – I am prejudiced that the older the people are, the less likely they are to accept that I am correct about the label I’ve chosen to apply to myself. They might assume incorrect things about me. Etc.

For the first time since realizing I was ace, I feel like I can trust and enjoy the company of a new group of people who are all dedicated to the same volunteer cause that I am, and at the same time I just… don’t trust them enough. And I wish I did. I wish I wasn’t so scared.

Being an Asexual Fangirl (Part 2)

Hey there, everybody. This is my second of two, connected, late submissions for the February 2015 Carnival of Aces, which had the theme “Cross Community Connections”. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, please check it out here. Please also read forzandopod​’s take on the subject, in a reply to my post, here: http://forzandopod.tumblr.com/post/112589310859/being-an-asexual-fangirl-part-1 😉 And my reply, in return: http://luvtheheaven.tumblr.com/post/112641376582/being-an-asexual-fangirl-part-1

Part 2, here, of my two posts on this topic, is where I discuss my experience as a person who is now well aware she is aromantic-spectrum, kissing- & sex-averse, and asexual while being in fandom communities.  Part 1 was exploring being in the fandom communities before I knew the term asexuality and before I knew I was ace myself.

Being an Asexual Fangirl (Part 1)

Hey there, everybody. This is my first of two, connected, late submissions for the February 2015 Carnival of Aces, which had the theme “Cross Community Connections”. I know, I know, it’s March now…

Meaning I’ve been blogging about asexuality on my From Fandom to Family WordPress blog here for about 1 year now! March 2014 was when I wrote my first post on these topics.

However, it has been about 1 decade since I became a fangirl. Yes, 2005, and in some ways 2004, was when I, as a young teenager beginning high school, began to become involved in online activities that some could classify as fandom.

I hesitated to write this post for this particular carnival topic, because it is less serious than most of the wonderful other posts I’ve seen written for it. It is not about “intersectionality” in terms of “the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination.”

I’m simply discussing the fact that I am someone who is both asexual and has been in the fandom community for a long time now.

I could’ve also discussed what it’s like to be a person invested in fandom in the asexual community. But that’s… harder to put any words around, and isn’t as big of a deal.

So let me proceed, in Part 1 of my two posts on this topic, to discuss my experience as a person who didn’t know she was aromantic-spectrum, kissing- & sex-averse, and asexual while being in fandom communities. (The fact that I am maybe aromantic, and do not enjoy kissing/sex cannot be separated, for me, from my personal experience with asexuality. I know not all asexuals have the same experiences.) Part 2 will explore being in the fandom communities once I did call myself asexual. Once I had figured out the label applied to me.