Our next aro-spec creator is Alexis, who also goes by Wishie and is known on Tumblr as @lvbytes. They’re better known to the aro-spec community, though, as @aro-positivity!
Alexis is a POC and an agender, aroace writer of original fiction and fanfiction, the latter for the It fandom. You can find their fanworks on AO3 and invest a few dollars in worthy aro-spec talent via their Ko-Fi.
With us Alexis talks about the difficulty of writing romance as an aro, their passion for writing narratives centred on multiple forms of love, the importance of constructive positivity and the pressure aro-spec creatives feel to write representational aro-spec characters. Their passion for supporting the aro-spec community infuses every sentence, so please let’s give them all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.
Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?
I hadn’t considered that I was aro for the longest time. I think a part of it was a lot of pressure in my life around finding a partner, or the stereotype that no aromantic person is capable of love. Either way, even after I discovered that being queer was a thing people could be (I grew up in a fairly conservative area) I still thought I was cishet. Then I identified as cis and pan, and shortly after that, agender and bi, and then a lesbian for quite a while longer. Side effect of this? I’ve been in a lot of relationships, and they’ve all ended the exact same way.
It wasn’t until a year-long relationship of mine had ended, and I was crying my heart out and wondering why I didn’t care more when the other person was clearly in pieces, when a friend of mine suggested that maybe I was aroace.
This sparked a meticulous google search on aromanticism, things I’d missed while learning about the LGBTQIA+ community the first time. I had a lot of internalized aphobia I had to get over before I could fully accept myself, and like much of the community, I still struggle with internalized aphobia and amatonormativity. I started @aro-positivity in part because I didn’t see a whole lot of actual, constructive positivity coming out of the community, or at least not gathered in one place, and I wanted a way I could constructively learn to accept my identity and who I was.
Aro Worlds 