This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda. It was originally posted on Tumblr.
This post was written for the February 2017 Carnival of Aces on the topic of Resistance, Activism, and Self-Care.
Content warnings: discussion of anti-ace hostility and familial rejection, mention of sexual violence
It’s hard for me to pinpoint the moment when ace blogging stopped being fun and started being anxiety-inducing. By the time I was writing my Ace Survivors as Rhetorical Devices series, anxiety had me checking and double-checking and triple-checking and obsessing over every single word–I’m proud of the end product, but getting to that product required way more energy than it should have. But even before that, I think I was already starting to burn out.
It’s not hard to point at particular factors that led to burnout. There’s the fact that I’m a healer in a community full of people who would prefer to DPS, that I’m trying to heal while being hit with friendly fire pretty constantly. There are the waves of hostility/“ace discourse” (are aces queer, are aces oppressed, are aces invading LGBT spaces, are aces harming real LGBT people, etc.), which, while I’ve seen it all before, does wear on you, especially if your experiences are constantly being leveraged as “proof” of one thing or another. There are the stresses of school–I passed my qualifying examinations last year, which ate up pretty much all of my time for 9 months and then left me wiped out. Then the election happened in November, and I had to do crisis control in my immediate social circle (mostly successful) and try to shore up my already crappy mental health (less successful). Obviously I was going to burn out–it’s only impressive that it took this long.
Concept Awesome 