In the spirit of me watching a ton of Buzzfeed videos on non-heterosexual people answering questions about being gay, or bi, or whatever-I’m in the mood to talk about asexuality.

Now, what I’m talking about here is my own experiences with identifying as asexual with a healthy mixture of what I’ve heard from friends or peers who also identify as asexual.

So, from the very beginning- what is being asexual? Broadly and without going very detailed into it, being asexual is when you experience no sexual attraction to anyone.

Like everything else in the world, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Being ace (shorthand for asexual) is a spectrum. There are ace people who are completely sex-repulsed, meaning that the idea of having sex is repulsive to them. On the other side of the spectrum, it isn’t people who aren’t ace. It is people who are willing to have sex.

First and foremost, people who are ace aren’t wrong. They don’t have something missing in their brain or their soul or something ridiculous like that. They just don’t want to sleep with anyone.

A lot of this is generalizations, so, sorry about that.

My own experience with my sexuality is, as any of my friends from High School would tell you, was messy. I dated a lot of different people, of different genders and such. I wanted to find something that made me want them like they wanted me.

And nothing worked. On a subconscious level, I knew this. On a conscious level, I tried not to give it much thought.

It wasn’t until senior year of high school, around 3-4 years ago, that a friend told me about being asexual. And honestly? It was like a slap in the face- like oh, that’s what it is.

Being ace in a world that is constantly bombarded and supersaturated in sex is about as easy as it sounds. Everyone around me- teenagers at the time like me- were bursting with sexual energy leaving me feeling alone and confused.

Sure, I talked a big game at the time but that was because I really didn’t know what else to do.

I could look at someone like Chris Hemsworth and hear my friends talk about how attractive he is and just see someone who’s aesthetically pleasing to me.

It really wasn’t fun. Especially since, as I’ve found out, Asexuals tend to be excluded from LGBT* spaces.

Few things right here- I said tends to be. I am not saying every LGBT* space does it. Next, I’m using the acronym LGBT* because I think it is the most well-known and used term to describe the non-heterosexual community.

If you are asking why I need to point out the acronym thing it is because there’s about a billion and a half different acronyms because there are so many different kinds of sexualities and genders. It’s like alphabet soup. LGBT, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender is really just four very broad terms. I put the * because it represents the rest of the community- the sexualities and genders I know about and I don’t. Such as being intersex, asexual, aromantic, Queer, etc.

I think it would be reasonable to say that anyone not asexual or aromantic might not understand it and that’s the reason for the exclusion? Or I could be completely off the mark, which is totally possible.

There is one thing I know though, aside from being a 100% certain in my sexuality (middle school/high school me is shrieking with happiness), is that being ace is made a hundred times easier when you’re dating someone whose also ace.

But an Asexual and an Asexual dating is its own different article.

In case you don’t know, Asexual and Aromantic are different things. Aromantic is when someone doesn’t experience a desire to be in love or maybe they don’t feel romantic love at all.