This blog was written during Asexuality Awareness Week 2021, October 24-30.
At the start of 2020 I pitched a personal essay story to the Huffington Post personal section. It was an essay outlining my discovery of Demisexuality* and how that discovery impacted me as a person. I thought a few people would read it before life went on. What I didn’t expect was for the article to go viral during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, or to see my face on other media platforms’ homepages sent in screenshots from friends around the world, or to be inundated with messages across social media platforms or even my personal email.
Suddenly this deeply personal piece I had published became my calling card. It made its way around the web again earlier this year when HuffPo republished it and it still pops up time after time on social media where folks inevitably find me. It’s heartening to know so many people were positively impacted, but it’s also scary to put yourself out there.
Last week author and DePaul alumna Sesali Bowen gave a talk via Zoom with the DePaul Women’s Center about her new book Bad Fat Black Girl. Bowen’s book, part memoir and part trap feminist manifesto, is full of her lived experiences. Pulling those experiences out for public consumption is something she spoke to during her talk. She said it was a difficult process which was helped through therapy, her openness around the difficulty of writing about one’s own life for public consumption was inspiring.
Her astute honesty inspired this reflection on publishing personal essays. Although my essay is a drop in the bucket compared to Bowen’s book, writing the piece for the public was a new kind of emotional labor. Some of the more painful details of my journey didn’t make it to the final iteration of the essay, yet the process of writing them down brought them back to the forefront of my mind. Suffice it to say human journeys are not linear or clean; they’re fraught with trauma and heartache.
Even so, despite the trolls of the world, I have no regrets about publishing my essay. People all over the world have reached out to me with thanks, hope or even coming out themselves because there is so little asexuality spectrum representation that we don’t even always know what it looks like. Just like with Bowen’s book (which is brilliant, I highly recommend it), there are lived experiences that teach us things about ourselves as well as those around us.
Writing about ourselves can be extremely difficult, especially when we dig into the darker parts of our lives. At the same time, in sharing our truths with the wider world we are giving other people opportunities to feel valid. For every 100 internet jerks telling me I’m just making words up for attention, there is one person in the comments saying thank you for making them feel less broken in an overly sexualized world. Not everyone is cut out for the realities of publishing personal work where anyone can say anything on the internet. But if you have a unique perspective that can bring hope, validation and maybe even joy to another human being, it’s worth the possibility of pushback every time.
*Demisexuality is part of the asexuality spectrum where an individual does not perceive attraction to someone without an emotional connection. The notion of “sex sells” often does not compute for Demis because in our minds we just see a person and not the desire. As an identity demisexuals and asexuals in general are still widely misunderstood. If you want to read more about representation and finding yourself here are two pieces I’ve written recently on the subjects for Yahoo: Asexual Representation and TikTok Algorithm and Sexuality.