Figuring Myself Out, Part 1: Eras of Identity

(My dad just had surgery, and it's not going the best, so I'll probably be a bit hard to find for a while. I may or may not have internet access for a couple of days. I guess I could always work from my phone.)

I'm now officially out to all of my friends (yay!), though the out-to-my-family thing is probably going to have to wait until my dad gets better. I've been talking to some of my friends, who are awesome, and decided that now would probably be a good time to document how I figured myself out, so I don't forget it. This, paired with the recent discussions on Apositive and the blogs about "real asexuals" and identification, led to some thinky thoughts on how I came to call myself ace, and how weirdly the progression of my identity fits into nice little eras.

The Huhwha...? Era- This was my whole life until I was fifteen or so. I'd never really thought about sexuality or knew it existed. The concept of sexual orientations was more or less beyond me. Through literature and movies I'd seen that people could like people of any sex or gender, but I didn't consider myself straight or anything else in particular. Around ages 14 and 15 I began to understand orientations but for some reason never considered my own. I had vague ideas about growing up and getting married, but hadn't really thought about it.

The Heterosexual Era- This lasted for about a month in my second year of high school. The transition occurred suddenly when, during a heated conversation with a bigotted student, I said frustratedly, "You don't have to be gay to support gay people! I support them, and I'm straight!" The next month was spent going, "Huh, I guess I am straight."

The OMGWTFBBQ Era- Not exactly sure how long this lasted, but it consisted of me wondering, "Am I straight? I think so. Actually, I think that gender and/or sex shouldn't matter about loving a person, theoretically. I'd be honest if I liked girls, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I got it." This was followed by a lot of Not Thinking About It.

The Bisexual Era - This was another few months of my second year of high school. More realistically, it was less of a bisexual era and more of an "I'm not straight" era. It was a combination of the theory from the Hetero Era and my figuring that if I wasn't straight and wasn't lesbian, then I had to be bi. It was pretty quickly overtaken by......

The Schrodinger Era - Most of the second half of my second year of high school was filled by various levels of what I call "Schrodinger's sexuality." After conducting a statistical analysis on my history of attraction to people (not even kidding about the statistical analysis), I came to the the conclusion that I was some sort of Schrodinger's cat, being unable to know my orientation without having had any experience. At the end of the analysis I added, "in effect asexual." Though I was familiar with AVEN (vaguely), it wasn't meant in the actual Ace-identified Asexual way as much as a descriptor of my current sexual practices.

The Asexual Era and The Ace Era - these two are similar enough to combine. During the Schrodinger and Asexual Era, I became more comfortable with calling myself asexual, but still was fairly unconnected with the asexual community. This changed, for some reason, during a conversation about sexuality and the media, and I made a conscious decision to explore my identity and become more aware of the community, thus leading into the modern Ace Era.

So I took a rather weird, complicated journey to identify as asexual. I've seen other people with even more confusing stories. Ily, on her blog here, mentions that she went from identifying as "totally straight" to "totally asexual." I find it interesting that everyone seems to have a unique story as to how they figured out they were ace. Part 2, up as soon as I finish it, will delve into more detail about the questioning part of asexual identification.