Being Commitment Driven

I started the draft of this blog post in June 2018, continued to work on it a bit in August 2018 after the month happened where the topic for the Carnival of Aces was “Nuance & Complexity”, and then… well… I just never finished it.

When the Carnival of Aros was launched in February 2019, I told myself I would host a Carnival of Aros one day on the topic of “commitment” and motivate myself to finish writing about this stuff when that time came.

In November 2020, I hosted the Carnival of Aros on the theme of “Commitment” and the call for submissions was here. I am also quite late into December finishing my own post, and posting the round up of all submissions. I sincerely apologize for the delay. Enjoy my finally finished post below. I tried to edit the draft from years ago to better reflect my views today, without scrapping all of it. I had to delete a lot of it though. I hope I didn’t miss anything I should have updated.

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I have really jumbled thoughts and feelings when it comes to commitment, such as what commitment in the context of interpersonal relationships even is, or why I desire it, but I do think that deep down I am very “commitment driven”. Both inside and outside of interpersonal relationships.

My original draft mentioned how for many years now separated the concepts of sexual attraction and sexual desire in the asexual community. Sometimes we all struggle to agree on what it is we’re really separating, like in this post and its comments.

Now that this a Carnival of Aros post, I’m cognizant that in both ace and aro communities, “behavior” is often importantly differentiated from “attraction”, and people can have a “drive” or “desire” to pursue a certain behavior all while lacking a common type of “attraction” that goes with it. Some may not find people hot/sexy but still want sex, others don’t really get crushes but still could happily receive/give a bouquet of flowers or box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, some people have friends without feeling “platonic attraction”, etc. Hopefully you get the gist of what I mean. We sometimes call aro people “romance-favorable” and less often talk about romantic “drive” or “desire”, but I think the concepts of drive and desire both can apply.

Feeling Fortunate For My Circumstances (Even Without Feeling Fortunate For My Asexuality Itself)

As is typical for me I’m late, I but still decided to write something for The Carnival of Aces. The theme this past month was “Asexuality as a Blessing”. Also note that I’ve written this all on my phone and so some odd errors might show up in this. Feel free to point them out to me and I’ll fix them!

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As an atheist, to be quite frank, the entire concept of blessings fundamentally clashes with my worldview. However metaphorically, or in a symbolic way, I still can appreciate certain things in life as reminiscent of the concept of a blessing (or, conversely, a curse).

Greta Christina writes from an atheist perspective often very similar to my own, and she discusses feeling fortunate for all the things that believers in a god might frame as a gift they’d been given. I have plenty of those feelings too for all sorts of things in my life, sure. I appreciate the ways things work out for me in my life circumstances in various venues. In fact, even when I did “earn” or do “deserve” certain things, I acknowledge that not everyone who deserves or earns certain good stuff ends up getting it and I can be appreciative of my situation in many many cases.

Jumping into the Bigger Picture—with Both My Feet, Radical Vulnerability, and Also a Team: Personally Avoiding Ace and Aro Activist Burnout (So Far)

This is a belated submission for the December 2018 Carnival of Aces on the topic of Burnout.

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As the call for submissions for this month’s carnival topic explained, a “frenzied pace of activities”

can… be a major source of stress that can put ace activists at risk of experiencing burnout – the state that results when the continued stress of an activity becomes overwhelming, to the point where individuals may find themselves less and less able to continue with it.

In addition, as the Wikipedia article notes,

[o]ccupational burnout is thought to result from long-term, unresolvable, job stress.

But personally don’t feel that close to burning out. On the contrary, I think I successfully keep adding fresh fuel to my fire. I’m energized, fulfilled, and engaged. Most places consider “engagement” to be the opposite of “burnout”.