Being Not Straight

okay before I even say anything let's lay out some ground rules this is probably going to be the most open I'll ever get about my personal life I know I've shared tidbits of myself and life through little stories but when it comes to personal stuff I'm very private especially within the past few years I'm going to be talking in very general surface level terms because specific personal details are for me to know and in the nicest way possible none of your business basically this is something I want to talk about share and bring a spotlight

to but at the same time you get the cliffnotes version so no trying to assume or guess anything beyond what I'm sharing within this video at the end of the day we're all just strangers refusing to listen to The Stranger Danger rule all right formalities aside let's get into it I've come to realize that I'm AO Ace which stands for aromantic asexual and I know what you're thinking that's not gay what the hell is that and you know what that is completely Fair because I didn't know what that was either aromantic and asexual are two

different things and I'm going to break them down to you separately starting with aromantic because no one really knows what that one is and also it's my personal favorite someone who's aromantic is defined as a person who feels very little to no romantic attraction to anyone at all so like they might not develop crushes on people or feel the need to be in a romantic relationship with anyone very general terms but hopefully you kind of get the gist if not here's a little story example From Me growing up I never developed crushes on anyone I

remember when I was in fifth grade kids were talking about their crushes left and right and it was starting to feel like something I had to experience too just because I I thought that's just what happens don't make fun of 9-year-old me I was a sheep anyway I decided I needed to have a crush because that's just what happens to people and I very robotically chose this random kid in the class who we can call Pikachu that's not his name he didn't mean anything to me and I didn't do anything about this Crush like I

didn't tell anyone or anything it was just a head Cannon thing for me to feel up to speed and like I was hitting my normal human emotions quota but it's funny cuz on Valentine's Day you know how in elementary school everyone would bring cheesy Walmart Valentine's cards for everyone in the class and then you'd have a box full of candy and Hollow emotions from everyone well my school did that when I went through my box I pulled out Pikachu's Valentine and thought to myself someone who has a crush on someone would keep this I think

so I put pachu copypaste Batman Valentine in my drawer and promptly forgot about it because it meant nothing to me but hey that's just what I thought I was supposed to do man I'm so good at this then like a year or so later when my mom was going through my room she pulled out the card and was like why do you have this and I was like honestly I have no idea years passed I entered Junior High and thought to myself all right this is the time where people start developing crushes and then do

something about it like get into relationships or something something so I was like preparing to be interested in people on the first day of school I scoped out the room to see if there was anyone that I thought looked like someone I could develop a crush on and this was when classes started being divided up into periods so there were like six batches of people I sifted through but no one cut my eye and I thought man unlucky went through the whole school year next year old around classes changed I did the same potentials Crush

scoping again and the same thing happened I wasn't drawn to anyone at all man unlucky again every year I thought something would change especially going into high school when people started actually hitting puberty and were getting conventionally attractive but my entire school life grades kindergarten to senior year which I'm pretty sure is like 13 years I wasn't interested in a single person throughout any of it and what's funny was I was thinking man what's the deal why is no one attractive and I went to a big high school there were like 3 and 1 half

thousand students there surely I I am not the outlier in this formula why are none of you attractive by the time I was going to college I really felt like I had to find someone it felt like I was falling behind the curve or if I was going to find someone it was going to have to happen now I made a lot of new friends and that's when I thought I developed my first genuine Crush long story short in hindsight no it wasn't a crush and I was just wrong I just met someone who I

thought was cool and funny and had a really strong desire to be close to them but looking back fact knowing what I do now it wasn't in a romantic way I realized I can get very excited and Tunnel Vision on people I think are really cool or interesting and kind of obsessed over getting to know them or just want to spend a lot of time with them but whenever I got into those tunnel vision moments if I sat down and asked myself if I actually wanted to be in a relationship with them and hold hands

or cuddle or kiss the answer was not really but if they wanted to I could go along with it which I do not think is is right in my very old flirting video which I refused to rewatch I think at one point in it I said something along the lines of if you're interested in someone but they just want to be friends I don't understand why some people can't deal with that and that was primarily because I didn't realize there is an emotional difference between a crush or falling in love and just being really good

friends with someone so oops sorry for the bad take I think I really just thought having a crush on someone was wanting to be their number one best friend look I said don't make fun of me to me it used to feel like if I was wanting to become friends with someone to that high of a degree that would be the next step or Justify why I wanted to put this much time effort and energy into one person and it didn't feel right or even fair going through all of this with someone and then tell

them they're just a friend I don't know it just didn't feel like it made sense even though I really didn't technically see them in a romantic way I just didn't understand what was going on really or that there was supposed to to be real emotions instead of a logical understanding of of steps and the fact that I was under the assumption that I was supposed to be interested in people in a romantic way didn't help with anything I always preferred to say good friends but never felt like I could have that and I worried that

if I said no that we would just start drifting apart which I obviously didn't want either it's been a very long journey discovering this about myself everything I'm saying has all been extremely subconscious and not understood or defined for many years I even used to think I was by or pan for the longest time because I would think to myself well by is being interested in both genders I don't really care for either but zero is equal to zero so I guess I'm buyer pan I got math involved if I knew what a Romanticism was

when I was growing up things would have been a lot less complicated for me a lot sooner I think it's mainly because people don't really talk about it or even know what it is or that it's real romance and love is the number one most talked about about topic on the planet everything I've been taught or learned through Society is that love and romance is everywhere everyone feels it and it's going to happen to you just a funny little note there was a point where I was listening to some generic Romance song on the radio

you know like all of them and I just suddenly thought to myself wait do people actually feel these things towards each other like all these mushy lyrics are real emotions they're not joking and that's when I started feeling like something was different I approached romance under the blanket term thought of sure why not and didn't recognize it was actually a a feeling which might sound stupid but look I don't know no one presented me with any other options I did a lot of rationalizing if someone ever expressed romantic interest in me I would mentally make

a kind of logical list of their pros and cons and the pros and cons of what a relationship would look like with them based on what I knew about them as a person I didn't realize there was supposed to be an extra like excited feeling or the fact that you're not supposed to think about it as if it were a business exchange I understand compatibility is a huge important variable when it comes to sharing a relationship with someone but at the end of the day it's still apparently still a very emotionally driven thing and I

literally had to make that Discovery and teach it to myself now I'm going to talk about being a sexual very briefly and I'm going to preface it with let's all just be mature about this all right we're all pretending to be adults here I've got my eye on some of you behave okay this is definitely treading into uncomfortable personal boundary territory for me but yeah I do want to share that I'm aexual too which is defined as someone who feels little to no intimate attraction to anyone look I know we said we're all adults but

I'm still going to dance around the vocabulary all right yes there's a difference between romantic and intimate attraction little side note I will say you can experience romantic attraction to someone but no intimate attraction or you can experience intimate attraction but no romantic attraction you can be one and not the other it's not necessarily a package deal most people feel both and I do not feel either anyway I have never been magnetically attracted to the look or shape of a single person in my entire life and did not realize it was a real thing until

very recently I'm able to identify when someone looks conventionally attractive like by textbook definition but I never realized people are genuinely drawn to people they think are attractive I didn't know that people could just see someone and be like wow they're gorgeous I would love to get to know that person or maybe go on a date with them or whatever else you people do I didn't think it was real I thought people were exaggerating or something I don't know and I also couldn't believe that some people feel that with multiple people or like celebrities which

sounds absolutely exhausting it ties back to when I was in school like looking around for people to like it makes sense now that no one caught my eye because that doesn't happen to me I was just wasting my time for 13 years I feel like such a fool now there's an easy assumption to make about asexual people and that they all have zero interest in being intimate with anyone at all which actually isn't true some of them are genuinely turned off by it and some aren't some reasons would be that they just don't mind it

or they want to make their partner happy or enjoy the emotional closeness of it there's a million different reasons and a million different people am I sharing what kind of a people I am nope and you don't know me personally enough in the slightest to be able to try and parasocial analyze where I stand on that Spectrum I'm just here to say I am this we are moving on when I stumbled onto the term Arrow Ace and started realizing I fall into that category it helped me feel much more confident and sure of myself I've

read a lot about how people say they felt broken or that something was wrong with them but honestly I've is the complete opposite coming from my very biased perspective I think aoas is one of if not the coolest and most confident orientations out there not needing a single gram of romantic or intimate validation from anyone is so cool all you need is yourself to be happy maybe friends and family too and birds the more I came to terms with the fact I'm aroas the more empowered and capable I felt but at the same time I

was also starting to feel more alone and isolated as cool and amazing and unique and awesome as I think it is it can be really hard for other people to relate to or even understand everyone else and their orientations are able to bond and relate to the love and romance aspects and we're over here like we don't do that I don't even know if I'm explaining it very well it kind of does go against everything everyone's ever been taught about anything romance is taught to be a basic assumed emotion which I do think is a

bit misleading a comment argument used against the aoas orientation is that romance and intimacy is what makes someone human but I mean I don't know lots of birds mate for life which is a better ratio than people and all animals get frisky you know that's just how they became not extinct it's not an exclusive to humans thing if I were to guess I would assume the thing that makes someone human is basic empathy like I'm not an emotionalist monster I can still love people I love my family and my pets just platonically and I would

hope that you're the same I just don't experience romantic love which I don't know I don't think that's harming anyone definitely not me I'm having the time of my life I don't think you need to be in a relationship to be happy and if you don't want to be just on your own I think there's many types of people in relationships that push the boundaries of what a conventional relationship looks like telling someone that they need to be in a romantic relationship to be happy and fulfilled is weird and then when that person says they're

not happy they're told relationships take a lot of work and that's just how it goes and that's also weird I don't know I also think it's weird that once someone reaches a certain age people inherently start thinking it's sad they're not in a romantic relationship or assume they're lonely and sad no one thinks a child is sad and lonely just because they're not in a long-term relationship I I don't know I I don't get it and and I also think I'm rambling at the end of the day it's all very complicated to talk about these

things especially because I don't know the feelings I'm supposed to be feeling let alone talk about I just know for me the terms aromantic and asexual are able to articulate things I was subconsciously feeling and thinking before I even realized I was feeling and thinking them I don't plan on talking about this very much if at all ever again I just want to play my silly little video games maybe tell a story here or there but I wanted to bring the orientations to the surface and try to get more representation out there because I thought

if I could help more people become more aware of this then that would be awesome I was confused as hell for a while and could have used something like this it's a real thing you don't have to feel any sort of romance or whatever to be considered a real person personally I think it's really cool and badass and don't be afraid to look more into a Romanticism or asexual ISM if any of what I said in this video resonated with you to any degree like I said this is all very surface level stuff they're both

much larger spectrums than you'd think and maybe you fall under some umbrella a category with them I don't know or not either way this has all been my personal experience with this stuff is there more for me to figure out within it yeah I'm pretty sure there is it can get pretty complicated and confusing haha awesome will I be sharing any of that with you nope no way this is all you get hope you can understand even just a little of what I talked about and if not that's totally fine I just hope you can

be nice thanks for listening I never really intended on making this video because I haven't really felt a strong urge to like I I don't like using this phrase for myself but but come out but I I did end up wanting to make the video to make people more aware of this stuff because I think it's important and someone has to there's not really that many people doing it right now anyway yeah just moving forward I guess see you later