The Carnival of Aces is a long-running monthly asexuality-themed blogging event, run by The Asexual Agenda. Each month, the host picks a theme and puts out a call for submissions from the community, then collects the submissions into a roundup post at the end of the month. (Last month’s Carnival was hosted on The Demi Deviant, and the theme was Deviant Identities.)

The theme I have selected for this month is “Telling Our Stories“.

Update! This month’s roundup is now available!

Over the years in ace circles, one thing that has always stood out to me is the power of the personal story of asexuality. More so than the academic encyclopedia articles or silly memes or 101 outreach pamphlet, the personal story is able to reach out and make someone truly feel that they are not alone.

I’ve recently started working on an autobiographical account of my own aceness, in all its awkward and embarrassing glory, and that got me thinking about the personal stories we tell and why we tell them, as well as the stories we don’t tell and why we don’t tell them. We’ll often freely talk about the lightbulb moment where we discovered asexuality, but usually skip the pain and heartbreak and confusion that we encountered along the way. But these are all valid parts of our asexual journey. So what goes into the decision around what we talk about, who we talk to, and how we tell these stories?

That’s what I want to explore this month. Not the personal stories themselves, I want to talk about the act of telling our stories.

Here are a few specific prompts, but please feel free to talk about anything else that might come to mind:

How do you decide which stories to tell and which stories not to tell?

Are there any stories you wish more people would tell?

Are there any stories you’re tired of telling or tired of hearing?

Who is your audience? Does the way you tell the same story change depending on who is listening?

What medium do you use for your storytelling?

Do you ever feel like you can’t tell your story?

Do you ever use the veil of fiction to surreptitiously tell your personal story?

How do you handle other people who may appear in your personal stories?

Why do you tell your story?

Submission Instructions:

There are several ways you can submit your blog post for the carnival:

Leave a link to it in the comments below.

Email me at: a c e @ a s e x u a l i t y a r c h i v e . c o m

Send an ask or a message me on Tumblr (@redbeardace)

@AceArchive on Twitter

Submissions are due by September 30th, 2019. (But I’ll accept latecomers and procrastinators…)

I’ll acknowledge every submission I get, so if you send something in and don’t hear from me within a couple of days, please try again with a different method.

(If you want to write for this month’s carnival and don’t have a blog of your own to post it on, contact me above, and I’ll be happy to help guest host your post.)