Here’s a song I listened to while I was writing this:
Maybe I’m not as asexual as I once thought.
Maybe I’ve allowed that word, that label, to lord over me a bit too much, keeping me closed off from the organic ways desire wants to move through and with me. Maybe, in pursuit of some definitive answer regarding my sexual issues, I found refuge in ‘asexual’ not because it fit but because it gave me a break from trying to fix myself.
Maybe it still fits. Or maybe I’ve grown beyond it. Maybe my sexuality doesn’t want to be defined; maybe it’s never wanted to be defined but I’ve persisted in trying to box it and myself in. Maybe I do that—box myself in with labels—as a way to make myself more comfortable in the face of not knowing. Maybe I’ve lost myself in my insistence on knowing myself. Maybe I don’t know myself as well as I think.
Maybe I should stop leading with ‘I’m on the ace spectrum’ in my dating profiles. Maybe not forever, maybe for just right now. Maybe it confuses people. Maybe it confuses me. Maybe it’s too presumptuous. Maybe it concretizes what something could be between us before anything has happened yet. Maybe, because my sexuality and desire and attraction can be so fluid and relative and contextual, I am smothering connections before they even begin by way of having my aceness be so large in my identity. Maybe I should let my sexuality breathe more. Maybe it would surprise me more.