anagnori:

It’s sad when other people refuse to accept someone as asexual and keep coming up with excuses to invalidate the asexual person’s feelings.

But it’s even sadder when an asexual person comes up with those excuses all on their own to rationalize why they can’t be asexual.

I knew about the existence of asexuality from a young age. I encountered the term while researching other LGBT+ identities, and accepted immediately that asexual people existed. But it took almost a full decade before I realized that it applied to me. In the intervening years, my mind kept inventing rationalizations for why I couldn’t be asexual, and I didn’t even notice it at the time. I was confused about my sexuality, and open to being gay, straight, bi or pan if that’s how things turned out, but asexuality never occurred to me as a serious option.

Here are some of the things I said to myself while I was growing up:

• “Well, most people are straight, so I’m probably straight, too.”
• “I’m just a late bloomer.”
• “Crushes aren’t real, they’re just a cultural invention to let girls express attraction without directly acknowledging sexual desires they’re ashamed of.”
• “I’m not attracted to anyone because all the people at my high school are gross and immature.”
• “I’m just not ready for a romantic relationship yet.”
• “I only want to have sex with someone I love, otherwise it won’t be special enough to me. And I’m just not in love with anyone yet.”
• “None of these people are my type.”
• “My classmates act more sexually than I do because pop culture has told them that’s what teenagers are supposed to do.”
• “I’m more emotionally mature than these people so being attracted to them would just be weird and creepy.”
• “I’ll start dating when I go to college.”
• “[in college] I’ll start dating when I make enough friends to know that I’m not just dating because I’m lonely.”
• “[later] I’ll start dating when I actually make some sexually attractive friends.”

I mean, seriously? Identifying as straight just because it was “statistically probable,” not because it reflected my own feelings and experiences? Claiming that not ONE person in my entire high school was attractive and mature enough to date? Thinking crushes didn’t exist? I was remarkably oblivious to how different I was.

I had internalized society’s ideas about love, sex and relationships so deeply that I didn’t even need an oppressor to erase me anymore. I was perfectly capable of erasing myself.