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How to Wear a Rainbow
An asexual’s struggle to find Pride
It’s Pride Month. Or so social media keeps telling me.
I wish I felt like those cute twenty-somethings in sunlit Instagram photos — rainbow filters, flowers in their hair, holding hands and kissing and laughing, proud to be themselves. People who go to parades, form tight-knit communities, and live out their queerness in proud defiance of a world that holds them back. I wish I felt it in my bones the way so many others do.
My queerness, however, is the opposite. My asexuality is limiting. Alienating. When most people come out, it’s the beginning of their story, a chance to start over as the person they were meant to be. For me, it was the opposite. Accepting that I was asexual meant closing a door. Accepting the fact that there would be no love story. No spouse. No great, epic Hollywood romance. No children. No legacy. It would be me, alone, until the end.
Whether we like it or not, the world revolves around sexuality. They don’t make multi-million dollar films or write epic pop ballads about platonic relationships. On a social scale, they just don’t compare to romance.
If only wishing could make it otherwise.
Asexuality has never been something that made me proud. Instead, it was a way of explaining myself. Of…
