When I was little my parents used to tell me that "You should only have a partner when you intended to marry them;" I never wanted to marry, that's been a fact since I can remember, so it bears to say I came to the conclusion "I'll never have a partner"
When I was growing up my peers told me that having sex was amazing, they tried to express how attraction felt "It's like wanting to eat someone with your whole body;" I never felt that, people told me I just had to wait, I'm still waiting.
As an adult I entertained the idea of having a companion, someone to share my life with and I was told it made absolutely no sense, "A relationship is like you live with your best friend but you also have sex, if you don't have sex there is no sense."
I internalized it, it grew on me and eventually, I stopped trying to make sense to all and made my peace for a loner life.
I met someone, he was my best friend, I didn't want to eat him with my body, but I wanted ti carve myself inside him. I was clear and told him that I understood very little about cues and intentions, he said we were best friends, doing things best friends did...we were not, it took me a while to understand and a lot of heartache to accept I had been taken advantage of for years. That's when I realized with my therapist I am also autistic.
I was sent to this earth without a user's manual, without compass and without decoder.
I was put here to be autistic, asexual and aromantic. And once I found a reason why, when I found connection to the LGBTQ+ community, I was told I was wrong, I should get checked, maybe it's a hormone imbalance...
That was the first time that I actually felt I wasn't human (a term actually used upon me through time,) so I gave up, I gave up on trying to find familiarity, comfort, understanding.
This year is the first time that I feel myself valid, there are books and fanfiction with characters that are aro or ace or both, Tumblr is trending my labels, I see aroace butterflies, aroace moons, aroace dragons. There are others like me out there, but even better, there are others out there not like me, that still see we exist!
Yesterday I read a line that said "You should not be expected to come with a warning for people to love you" I cried cathartically for a good while.
Is this post about woe is me? No, is this about me wanting people to validate me? Strangely no.
This is cathartic, letting something off my chest, but this is also a plea to everyone to be kind, to not segregate people if they are different than you, to be kind to others in general; To let allos a little bit into the mind and life of someone that is even a tinier minority and try to not repeat mistakes onto the next generation, this generation even, we're never too late.
