{"id":1996,"date":"2023-01-28T19:42:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-29T01:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1996"},"modified":"2023-02-14T13:41:42","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T19:41:42","slug":"a-an-echolocation-by-ceridwen-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1996","title":{"rendered":"“A: an echolocation” by Ceridwen Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m tucked in a favorite corner of my college library filling out an anonymous Psych 101 project survey. It\u2019s supposed to be a boring little study break: click, click, click. I hesitate over the sexual orientation question. There\u2019s something about being asked so anonymously and so abstractly, Who do you want? What are you? <\/em>(not So, do you have a boyfriend\/girlfriend?) <\/em>that throws me out of autopilot.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, I will struggle to remember exactly how the options are worded and in what order they appear, but they boil down to four: straight, gay, bisexual, and questioning. (A small menu, even for 2008.) On every previous survey I\u2019ve filled out, I\u2019ve picked straight\u2014assuming myself to be so in the absence of clear signals to the contrary. But this time, in the absence of clear signals, I click \u201cquestioning\u200b.\u200b\u201d I leave the library and look out across the lake. It\u2019s a beautiful spring evening and I take a long, meandering path back to my dorm.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This essay contains asterisks (from the Greek asteriskos<\/em>, \u201csmall stars\u201d): little risks, little symbols for what is omitted. They signal complications to be addressed elsewhere. They suggest provisionality\u2014of thought, of language. They admit to unknowns. They constellate experiences and ideas that aren\u2019t quite speakable. There\u2019s a human tendency (or maybe a writerly one) to blame the void, to make an abscess of absence, to fill it with problem and mystery. But sometimes absence is just itself. And sometimes it is a guidepost, a north star.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A small green notebook falls out of my locker. A classmate starts to flip through it as she picks it up and asks me what\u2019s in it. I panic and lie, blurting out that it\u2019s a diary and contains lists of boys I have crushes on. The notebook is actually for poems and stories\u2014these feel urgent and private in a way I can\u2019t explain or justify\u2014but I sense that \u201ccrushes\u201d\u200b\u200b will have more validity with my classmate as a confidential matter. I\u2019m trying to speak her language, trying to keep up with my peers at a moment when not having crushes has suddenly become weirder than having them. My classmate hands the notebook back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What I do experience are word crushes\u2014lingering obsessions with particular sounds. It delights me to spot certain words in print, to hear them spoken aloud, to tease out their meanings in the dictionary, to use them in my own writing. I smile, I swoon, I cast longing glances.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For years and years, my older half-sisters ask (in various terms) if I have a crush on any guys (\u201cOr girls\u200b,\u200b\u201d\u200b \u200bthey begin to add) in my class. I know they are trying to bond with me, but I keep drawing a blank.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How long can you be a late bloomer before they decide you aren\u2019t a plant at all?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Briar, fathom, render, porridge, enigma, benevolence, reckoning, eclipse, terrain, murmur, lapse, thistle, callow. No one asks me about these.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m trying on a black-and-white dress when my best friend tells me she is going to start dating after \u200bour college \u200bgraduation. We\u2019ve known each other since first grade. I tell her I\u2019m still not interested. She mentions asexuality; she says she thought for a bit last summer that she might be asexual, but now she really does want to date men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m more worried about finding a job or getting into graduate school than I am about pinning down my orientation. To change the subject, I ask if the dress makes me look like a zebra. What I really want to ask is if she will still love me when there is a vast gulf of experience between us.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes,\u201d my friend says, \u201cbut a cutely nerdy one.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are no clear answers, even in black and white. This is not the pivotal scene it could have been. I can\u2019t read into it. My life seems full of such illegible moments, such hedges and discretions.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To be aromantic and asexual is to find oneself wearing assumptions that don\u2019t fit, to find oneself veering from an expected life trajectory\u2014following an absence or negation of markers, following a quiet inner logic. I\u2019ve learned to inhabit the allosexual world\u200b so well,\u200b learned its language of attraction, adopted its narratives and values\u200b,\u200b that it takes me decades to realize I\u2019m operating in a second language, constantly navigating, and translating. I don\u2019t experience sexual attraction in a world where sexual attraction is assumed to steer our lives, where desire drives character and plot.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to let go of the idea of falling in love\u2014or rather\u200b,\u200b the narrative arc and the social affirmation having a partner would bring me. In a culture that has linked adulthood and agency with sexual experience (an assumption that is problematic for just about everyone), it\u2019s hard to step off the map and out of chronology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even the word \u200b\u201c\u200borientation\u200b\u201d\u200b requires a reckoning. One can only be oriented in relationship to \u200bothers\u200b. Orientation implies a journey and a destination in a particular direction; it doesn\u2019t invite interoception; it doesn\u2019t encourage stepping back and disregarding the pre-established landmarks and milestones of adulthood, of narrative. Navigation, though, is a basic human need, and orientation is also the process of getting one\u2019s bearings, becoming familiar, noting boundaries. Asexuality, for me, entails moments of disorientation\u2014that inner dizziness that prompts me to pause and reconsider the terrain, to drink water and stretch my feet, to stop and look up at the sky or down at the roots of a tree\u200b.\u200b To choose, if necessary, an alternate route. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of the first difficulties of coming out is that the very phrase \u201ccoming out\u201d seems not to fit. I feel that I am already \u2018outside\u2019 the allosexual realm and that knowing for myself that I am asexual is a kind of inner reckoning, a homeward journey\u2014a retreat from the performance of allosexual assumptions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I google \u201casexual\u201d\u200b \u200bshortly after relocating to California for grad school. Late afternoon sun pours in through the windows of my student housing unit. I withdraw into my tiny box of a bedroom so my roommate won\u2019t see me (do I not want her to see \u201casexual\u201d in my search box or do I not want her to see me freaking out about what I find?). I tell myself aloud\u200b,\u200b \u201cI\u2019m just eliminating a possibility\u200b,\u200b\u201d\u200b but \u200bI know that I\u2019m lying. My heart is beating too fast for this to be a multiple-choice question; this isn\u2019t a survey for some stranger\u2019s Psych project or a pop quiz I can guess my way through. It feels, at the moment, like the problem of my life.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m at a party in an apartment a few \u200bfloors\u200b below mine and a man is flirting with me. He is smart and funny and friendly and athletic and has hazel eyes. In theory, this should be something I want, his leaning closer and putting his hand on my arm. But it\u2019s a kind of out-of-body experience. I don\u2019t feel threatened; I just feel deeply not myself, as though I\u2019m under local anesthesia and not quite connected to my limbs, as though I\u2019m trying to write with my left hand, as though I\u2019m reading from a script written by someone else.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I step back and he lets me; he politely wraps up the conversation and turns elsewhere. I feel alive again. I leave the party a short while later.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I google \u201casexual,\u201d I read until my eyes are dry and burning. The first definition (\u201cAn asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction\u201d) presents a riddle: how can I know that I don\u2019t experience sexual attraction if I don\u2019t know what it feels like because I haven\u2019t experienced it? But this very uncertainty is a kind of sureness; it has pressure and heft to it. I keep scrolling; I feel that gut-plummeting sensation of knowing something to be accurate and necessary. A kind of inner honing device kicks on.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m not cold, not hollow. I can finally name the mysterious glass wall I\u2019ve sensed growing between myself and my peers since early adolescence. I can start to trace the dissonance between what I\u2019ve read and watched and been told about love and sex and what I\u2019ve felt. I\u2019m unfrozen; I\u2019m full of questions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Every week I take a bus to the nearest stretch of beach and wade ankle-deep along the shore of the Pacific. I watch the tide go in or out; I lean towards labeling myself and lean away from it. I decide the real question isn\u2019t what to call myself, or whether to tell other people, but what to do. There\u2019s clarity and freedom in realizing that I might want and seek a life entirely without sex. I ask myself what else I might say no to, what I might choose instead. I decide to drop out of my anthropology program and apply to MFAs in creative writing. Much later, I will wonder if I was initially drawn toward anthropology because I felt that there was something I didn\u2019t quite get about my own culture, because I wanted tools for observing and understanding the allosexual world. I\u2019m only beginning to reread my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At five, one of my favorite picture books is called The Patchwork Lady<\/em>. In it, a woman decorates her home (in an eccentric patchwork style) and bakes a cake with the help of a houseful of pets. She hosts dinner for a gathering of friends. At the end of the book, she waves goodbye to all her friends and returns contentedly to her solitary life. I want to be her when I grow up\u2014to design my own home, to live near but not with friends, among cats and dogs.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will take me a long time to realize what a strange book this is with its celebration of spinsterhood and creativity. I will love it all the more. I will want to gather all the different threads and parts of myself together and patch them into a whole\u200b,\u200b the way she does pieces of a crumbled cake.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Finishing my MFA in the Midwest, I\u2019m back in a climate similar to the one I grew up in\u2014with summer storms and overcast winters. But I often find myself mired in inner conflict: trying to express something that feels ineffable and personal while my introverted temperament squirms. I walk my dog around a patch of prairie every morning and watch deer vanish and reappear while I think about the things I can\u2019t seem to write\u200b about\u200b.  Not only is it hard to find words for asexual experience, it\u2019s also hard to know if they are worth saying (for me, for those around me). I have a deep and instinctive sense of privacy\u2014both my own and others\u2019. I write a lot about my family, but I\u2019m also protective of them; I suspect that, if I were allosexual, I would write (or choose not to write) with equal care and discretion about any sexual or romantic partners.  Maybe, too, the idea of overtly announcing my asexuality clashes with my aesthetic (I\u2019m a subtlety junkie, a nuancer). I\u2019m never sure whether my modesty, my instinct to stay under the radar, to avoid attracting others\u2019 attention, is innate or learned, whether it is tied to being asexual or if it is simply another thread in the fabric of my being.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes my reticence feels political\u200b, too\u200b. It feels wrong to announce my asexuality, to suggest sexual attraction isn\u2019t a universal human experience, when my LBGTQ colleagues and friends are still struggling for equality. It feels potentially harmful to write about not experiencing sexual attraction in a world that is still hellbent on controlling women\u2019s sexuality and their bodies\u2014as if I would be handing ammunition to the abstinence-only crowd. If I follow this rabbit hole of thought too far, I start to wonder if my asexuality is, on some deep mind-body level beyond my conscious awareness, a political choice: a gut-level refusal of the metaphor of the sexual market and the objectification of women\u2019s bodies.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write and write around my silence and my questions. I write about my complicated family, about growing apart from childhood friends\u2014about all the kinds of love and heartbreak I do feel. After one workshop, my teacher remarks that I write \u201cunromantic love poems\u201d and this feels true. I wonder if I\u2019ve been writing aromantic and asexual poems all along without needing labels for them. I step out into the cloudy Midwestern dusk feeling, for a rare moment, at home in my own life.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m leaving a movie with friends who are talking about how hot an actor is; my teenage self trails behind and thinks instead about how the scenes were cut, how the score added to the suspense. I don\u2019t have language for this any more than I have language for my (a)sexuality, but years later I will recognize these thoughts as writerly thoughts.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why does absence require explicit framing, while presence is implicit? Am I really aromantic or just incapable of imagining an asexual romance? (What is the relationship between imagination and desire? We can imagine without desire, but can we desire without imagining?) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I move to Utah for yet another degree, building friendships and conversations around current projects and future plans, around the desert and the mountains. Still, every reference to Eden (and the reading list is full of these) is a reminder that Western culture has linked sexuality and knowledge; to be openly asexual, then, would be, on some level, to declare myself unknowing (and maybe also unknowable, maybe also unlovable) and inexperienced. I worry it would color every piece of writing I \u200bbring \u200bto workshop, not to mention my interactions with my own students. I worry about being seen as incapable of teaching or editing work with sexual content. As a white cis-gendered woman, I worry too about seeming to claim a diversity \u201cticket\u201d that I don\u2019t deserve. At the same time, when I get rejection letters describing my work as \u201clacking warmth\u201d or \u200breading \u200b\u201ca little too cerebral,\u201d I wonder how much the notion that \u201csex sells\u201d shapes editorial decisions (consciously and unconsciously).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I walk my dog in a canyon in the Wasatch foothills, stepping through patches of light and shadow, warm and cold air, trying to outthink my silence. My silence is a mixture of fear and an awareness that the available language\u2014the available labels\u2014don\u2019t quite express what I want to say. They feel accurate, but they also feel at once inadequate and overly prescriptive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The asexual community has generated an abundance of terminology, including a host of labels that split sexual and romantic orientation and parse attraction into different types (aesthetic, romantic, sexual, intellectual). I\u2019m grateful to have a framework for making sense of what does draw me toward certain people\u2014their voices, their kindness, their ideas, their physical grace. But many of the words seem clinical and unmusical; they provide a spreadsheet rather than a map. I\u2019ve always felt a bit allergic to categories and typologies, always been more inclined to see connection across a spectrum of variation than to use difference as a defining factor. None of the labels quite satisfy me (see how difficult it is to write in English without falling into allosexual metaphors). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019m really seeking are names for what I actually feel and want, not just labels for what I don\u2019t feel or don\u2019t want. As I pay more and more attention, I become aware of a wide range of subtle emotional and physiological responses\u200b, \u200bfew of which I have labels for; many having nothing to do with attraction of any kind and more to do with recognition, empathy, resonance, memory, and mood\u200b, that I\u200b experience when I interact with others. It feels problematic to align myself with an identity of nonexperience rather than affirmed experience. Sometimes these handfuls of words feel fraught and insufficient and I wish for a whole new language.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stand in the dust and toss sticks for my dog; I watch her refuse to fetch them. Her instincts lead her elsewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s like writing a poem\u2014considering syllables, weighing nuance, shuffling meanings, listening for what\u2019s invoked, what\u2019s evoked. Though still ambivalent about labels, I gravitate toward aroace. It\u2019s a good enough descriptor\u2014the least inaccurate\u2014and I\u2019m grateful to whoever thought to say it this way. A single arrow pointing nowhere. A hidden card, a game-changing factor. An alternate spelling with \u201csexual\u201d removed altogether.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I walk without a map on a trail I\u2019ve known since childhood. Pushed\u2014no, pulled\u2014back to my hometown by the pandemic and its aftermath, I walk every day. Sometimes I walk alone, sometimes with my dog, sometimes with a friend, sometimes with a ghost. The little trail is full of forks and branches, but they all eventually loop back to the heart of the park. My mind is full of words and questions, but I\u2019m questioning metaphor and narrative these days rather than my own asexuality. So what if my life feels more cyclical, more lyrical than linear? I like circles. Spider silk catches on my glasses and I peel it away and keep walking, letting my footsteps echo on the little wooden bridges over the creek.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ceridwen Hall is a poet and writing coach from Cincinnati. She holds a PhD from the University of Utah and is the author of three chapbooks: Automotive <\/em>(Finishing Line Press, 2020), Excursions <\/em>(Trainwreck Press, 2021), and fields drawn from subtle arrows<\/em> (GreenTower Press, 2023). Her full-length collection, Acoustic Shadows, <\/em>is forthcoming from Broadstone Books. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly<\/em>, Pembroke Magazine<\/em>, Tar River Poetry<\/em>, The Cincinnati Review<\/em>, and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be aromantic and asexual is to find oneself wearing assumptions that don\u2019t fit, to find oneself veering from an expected life trajectory\u2014following an absence or negation of markers, following a quiet inner logic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[86],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}