I’m scared to try again. Our last conversation didn’t go so well. You got angry, accused me of clinging to stubborn hopelessness. You said, “I just can’t go there with you.” I didn’t see how speaking the truth made me hopeless. Strange how mad it made you, not seeing hope in my truth.
All I was saying was that the world is set up to exclude people like me.
I understand why it might be hard for you to see it. It was invisible to me for thirty-seven years, because for that long the world just was. Discovering I was asexual and aromantic, that asexuality is a thing, that there is a word for what has made me different all my life—the discovery was like developing the ability to see oxygen molecules in the air. I tell you, they’re everywhere.
Even if to everyone else, the air just is.
Sexual attraction, romantic attraction — ubiquitous as oxygen. The attraction itself, and also the ways romantic love is privileged over everything else, so there, so present, invisible as air.
I wish you’d try to see it, to go there with me. Try an experiment. Sit in a coffee shop, not noticing anything in particular, just sitting. Just experiencing what is. This is how I used to sit too.
Then sit in a coffee shop with an awareness of asexuality and aromanticism, that it exists. Imagine it’s you. You’re the one…
