Every queer person has a different path to discovering or understanding their IDs, and many of these are shaped by who we are as a person. It’s not a surprise, then, how much writing has played a part into my identifying as aromantic.
It started with Claude, and it wasn’t conscious. As I’ve said yesterday, there was a fair amount of time during which I suspected I was aromantic but didn’t want to explore it, and had rather conflicting feelings about it (most of them rooted in internalized anti-aro ideas). Suffice is to say, I thought aromantic people were awesome, important, and too often erased, but also strongly felt that as a person in a romantic relationship, I didn’t need or want the label. (I was wrong).
When I started Baker Thief, I was already writing cool aromantic characters (hello Cal, hello Hasryan). Besides, the project was supposed to be a f/f romance full of Good Tropes, the result of a hour of nap while furious The 100 fans discussed Lexa’s brutal death. It took less than two weeks for it to turn into “bigender aromantic MC, demi “LI”, and a queerplatonic relationship”, which I’m pretty certain is in part due to how Aromantic Awareness Week wasn’t so long ago, and the questioning it had brought in me.
I did not set out to explore my aromanticism by writing Claude. Heck, I was still fairly solidly in denial about it. That is nonetheless what happened. I started slipping tiny bits of my experiences with romantic attraction, and articulating them within a character that proudly claimed the label made them hard to ignore. In hindsight, it feels obvious that I was validating myself through a character who had long finished his own questioning.
By the time I finished the first draft, I knew deep down I was aromantic. I wasn’t living it the same way Claude had and did, but I certainly had a lot of crossover in my experiences, and I was growing increasingly comfortable with the label. I never really came out as aromantic so much as I just started talking as one, and starting sentences with “as an aromantic person”, and everyone rolled with it (it was lovely and fairly low stress).
You won’t find exactly me in Claude, though, no matter how much the name makes it sound like a self-insert (that was an accident, I swear!). Although some of my unease and self-discovery is part of his experience, Claude’s aromanticism is in many ways more clear-cut, at least as we find him in the story, in the sense that he has figured most of himself out. It’s my personal belief that I needed it that way–that I needed something stable and firm to lean into.
I’ve gone past that point, though, which brings me to the second important aromantic character I’m writing into Baker Thief (there is more than these two I promise!): Livia, Claude’s twin. Livia is an important arospec character to me because she has very similar experiences to my own, and as the story picks up, she is still figuring herself out. This only comes up at the end of Baker Thief, since this particular novel doesn’t focus on her at all, but Livia is one of the two centres of the second book, and will be exploring her identity in it. I’ll likely be doing a mix and match of my own and fiction again, but much closer to home this time around. And unlike in Claude’s case, I am very aware of what I am doing, and quite excited about it!
So here’s to exploring yourself through fiction, and to just squarely putting yourself in it, no matter how “weird” or “off” you feel your experience is. The bottom line is that it still matters, it deserves to be out there, and you may be less alone than you think.
Small note: if you don’t want to miss Baker Thief’s release, the best way is always through my newsletter! It goes out monthly, or for special occasions.