— Asked by Anonymous

Well, I can tell you that you’re definitely not an attention-whore, because you are not whoring for attention. Attention-whores are the kind who post all on Facebook and make things like their sexuality a huge deal and stick their personality in other peoples’ faces. They choose a label like demisexuality primarily because they want to feel different or special, and not because they feel like it’s a word and community that help them understand themselves and provide support. If you’ve found the label to be useful in understanding your experience and contextualizing it with regard to other people, you are certainly not an attention-whore.

Identifying as demisexual for yourself is the first step. Let yourself become comfortable with it. It’s just a word after all, that happens to consistently describe a set of experiences that some people share. That’s all. Reading more asexual blogs and hanging around the Tumblr community will help you integrate it into yourself. Once you’ve become more comfortable, you can see about coming out to trusted friends or family. If people you come out to think you’re seeking attention, then that’s their problem, because if you truly were seeking attention, you wouldn’t be so nervous about coming out and gaining their acceptance, would you? If you wanted attention, you would blithely be telling the whole world, without care for the consequences—positive or negative.

I think a lot of aces struggle with this deep down, but remember, we’re all in this together. The “seeking attention” thing has also been applied to other demographics, such as people with mental illness. It’s just a thing people use to dismiss other peoples’ experiences.