Found my old AroAce Tumblr blog yesterday. I made it back when I thought I was an Oriented AroAce, lol. Back in 2019-ish? Debated deleting it, but in the end I decided to leave it up for posterity's sake. I do all my Aro posting on main now, anyway.
There were two posts I had made, though, that I wanna bring to light because they were interesting. The first was actually a draft of a vent post. Basically I was cranky because a lot of the posts in the tag back then were about people being upset and feeling broken about being aromantic, and how unrelatable that was to me ("did I miss something? Was I supposed to pass go? Was I not supposed to be cool with my identity from day 1?"). Honestly, now in 2022 the tag has a lot less of that sort of content in there, so things have improved since then. I still can't relate to making up crushes to appease other people though. That one's beyond me.
I was also cranky, and still am, at those vague "you're valid" posts. You know the ones, right? "Aromantic people are valid!" "It's okay to be alloaro!" etc., etc., with nothing else of substance in the post. I hate those; they do nothing for me. Like, I already know I'm valid; the human experience is already inherently valid. I don’t need permission for this. All in all, it was basically me whinging about how I have no idea how to feel like a part of a community (although looking back, I thing my aplatonicism might be to blame for that, but I'm digressing).
The second post that was interesting to me was me detailing, for ASAW 2019, how I figured out I was aromantic. I'm gonna copy/paste what I wrote:
One day in 11th grade I decided to figure out if I *~liked~* boys or girls or both, because those were the only options I knew about due to some of my friends fitting in those categories. So I was sitting in study hall, thinking really hard about boys and girls, and I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t *~like~* either of them. Which was a bit weird, but sure, whatever. I referred to *~liking~* neither girls nor boys as “The Void”, because obviously that was the secret fourth option that went alongside “lesbian, gay, or bi/pan”. My friends seemed amused by it, anyway. Flash forward a summer or two and I learned what aromanticism was and was like, “Hey look, The Void’s got an actual name!” So that was cool.
Also while reading about being aro a lot of things in my life suddenly made sense in hindsight, like why I’ve never had a crush on anyone in my entire life, and why an idle thought of “what if this girl had a crush on me” during my freshman year of college had me on edge for the next 24 hours, and why my enjoyment of fanfics centered around shipping and romance was rapidly declining. It was super neat to have an explanation for all of that. And I have something to point back to for other idiosyncrasies of mine, it’s great. I love it!
This is part of the reason why I never related to "feeling broken" or whatever; I straight up logically deduced my way into the orientation, and then felt only vindication when I found out it was a real thing, lol.
…And actually I lied there were some other interesting posts. One was about a game of Truth or Dare that I played where I was asked "What sort of qualities would you look for or want to have in a person that you would want to marry?” and had no answer (because…you know), to the shock and surprise of everyone else around the campfire (and also I got to say that I'd never had a crush before, which was apparently very exciting). The other was about how my a cappella group was changing their main color from teal and how I was secretly hoping it would be changed to green (they decided on yellow, in the end).
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