Random Chaos

So I'm going to have to dust off my passwords for things like Indeed, CareerBuilder, etc.

I'm definitely not going back to housekeeping. Damn near twelve years of that was enough. Between the burnout and the literal sciatica, there's just no way I'm going to be able to do that again.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out a lot of things. For one, I know two things for certain:

1) I am definitely not aro, and

2) I am definitely more ace than I thought.

I am perplexed by the people who don't get acespec identities. For one, it's like, what are you afraid of, that we won't do something? And the infighting about labels. They get called unnecessary, but those of us who have them worked hard to be seen. (Let me get one thing clear: I do not support foisting labels on people who didn't ask for them; this is all about one's own labels.)

It seems to be an old guard vs. new guard thing, this aversion to more labels even just existing. As (an old) millennial, I am all for the new phraseology. The words to explain how I feel didn't exist in my teens, or even my late twenties. I am positively enamored with the fact that a way to explain me exists now, when it didn't before. 

And I don't want that taken away. Which is what all this arguing feels like: "your labels are ridiculous, our old ones are good enough."

It gets dismissed as "the tumblrification of identity," but the fact is, things like Tumblr aren't exactly completely new. Before, ideas like this were disseminated in person (something that you can't really do right now in the era of COVID), or on message boards and such. I don't understand what would make that superior to what is going on now. Yeah, we stumble and fumble around a bit, but so did the old guard. In a lot of ways, we are more similar than we are different; it's another case of vs., in this case Old Tired versus Young Tired. I mean fuck, we should be at least bonding over that much!

The worst part of it is that I feel like I can't really speak up. I didn't really fall solidly into where I am until a couple of years ago, after a lot of living in denial about it. (That...that happens to a lot of us in the LGBTQ++ community, I've noticed.) When I finally felt like I could say something on it, there was all this...well I wouldn't call it vitriol, but it was a whole lot of Not Nice. You know, shit like "that doesn't exist" "you're just normal" "How is that different from the rest of people out there?"

Invalidation. That's what all this resistance boils down to. Invalidation. And we can't do much about it beyond attempting to advocate for ourselves in the face of it. It feels like a great big plate of nothing, when one's got no allies to back them up on it.

It's a good thing that the rest of the New Guard has a lot of fight in it. We shouldn't have to do this alone.