The Importance of Speaking Yourself: A Special First Anniversary Post

Image description: BTS, led by RM, during their 2018 speech to the UN. Today marks two special anniversaries for me; one is the first time I heard this speech, thus cementing my status as a fan of the group, and the other is the first anniversary of this blog! Grab your Valentine's Day candy and join me as I discuss why "speaking myself" for a year has transformed me for the better!

Hello, my very dear readers! If you’re a regular, I’m sure you noticed that this post is not appearing on my usual update day. You may have also noticed that today is Valentine’s Day. But for me, it’s something else, something very special: it’s my blog’s first anniversary! When I started this blog last year, the world looked very different; but for all the ways things have changed, I’ve been able to rely on this blog – and all of you! – as a rock of sanity and stability.

Working on this blog for a solid year has been an amazing experience, one that has helped me grow as a writer, an aspec person, and just as a person in general. It has allowed me to take something I did already – talking about aspec issues – and do it with a unique regularity, in a way I’ve never done anything before. And above all, it’s allowed me to use my voice in ways I never imagined. In fact, in honor of this special anniversary, I wanted to pen a special post about why this blog has been so important to me, and why this theme of speaking out has been, and will continue to be, an integral part of my life. I hope you enjoy!

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If every person’s life has a theme, my theme is almost certainly something related to my “voice.” I don’t merely mean this in a tangible way, as in, my actual speaking voice, although that has definitely played a part in my life and development. As a woman who has always had a slightly deeper register of speaking voice, my childhood was spent getting teased about not sounding feminine enough, and over the years I’ve thought a lot about my actual voice. But to me, when I hear the word “voice,” it evokes something far larger in scope and more meaningful in execution; to me, it conjures up the notion of who I am, what I stand for, and what I strive to do.

All my life, I have been drawn to people and things that deal with this theme. For example, a favorite movie of mine is the film “The King’s Speech,” which centers on Britain’s Prince Albert (who goes on to become King George VI) as he combats a debilitating stammer with the help of speech therapist, Lionel Logue. This is a story about someone who, on some occasions, literally can’t speak, but we are also shown very clearly that in other cases it’s less about the stammer and more about how it affects the reluctant monarch’s confidence. There is a spectacular scene as the movie reaches its climax where “Bertie”, who feels certain he cannot possibly address his nation as it stands on the brink of war, let alone actually lead them as a king, is ready to give up. Seeing this, Logue makes him understand that his right to be heard comes not because he has a “divine right” as a king, but from his inherent worth as a person. When Logue goads Bertie by asking why he should be heard, Bertie’s response is a five-word summation of the movie’s theme: “Because I have a voice.”

Although there is nothing that literally keeps me from speaking the way Bertie’s stammer does for him, this movie nevertheless has special meaning for me and a special place in my heart. When I was younger, I even recited the eponymous “king’s speech” as a graduation performance during a youth acting program. I couldn’t really see it at the time, but I think part of why this movie and its theme had such a huge impact on me was because, at that time, I was just beginning to discover my asexual identity, something which was not easy to speak about back then. In my early and mid-teens, as most young people are, I felt unsure of myself constantly. But for me, there was an added weight to it – an added sense of wrongness, of feeling like I didn’t truly fit in anywhere or with anyone. It was a struggle to find my own voice, let alone use it, because I felt like even when I did use it no one cared or listened. Over the years, that feeling quieted a little; I became more confident in my identity and I realized I was surrounded by people who loved and supported me. But I was still living in a world that was not built for me, and underneath the calmer surface I had managed to cultivate over the years, I nevertheless felt myself quietly burning.

Before I started this blog, I did other things with asexuality – wrote essays for school, penned posts for other blogs, made presentations at anime conventions. It’s not as though I was entirely without a voice. Indeed, I used my voice in a lot of other ways, even if it wasn’t related to asexuality. As a writer and a poet, I am constantly using my voice to convey emotions; I even had a job for a few years as a tour guide, making my living by literally communicating with people. Thus, it felt like day in and day out I was using and cultivating my voice. It was valuable work, but it didn’t quite go far enough. I spent years doing a lot of speaking, and in so doing, I was constantly conveying little parts of myself. But it felt as though I had to do more.

Talking about asexuality/aromanticism and living my truth were great, but I often felt myself lacking confidence in how I presented myself to the world. In some ways, I still felt as I had when I was a child and people made fun of my voice. I still let other people treat me as “less than,” and sometimes I even took it to heart. The famous quote springs to mind – “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” And in many ways, I think I did allow people to make me feel uncomfortable with who I am, let them rob me of the very voice I was working so hard to cultivate and to make me feel inferior. At first, I wanted to start this blog to give myself more credibility, so that when I gave presentations about aspec issues, I could identify myself as an aspec blogger rather than just “some girl talking about aspec stuff.” As I continued developing the idea, I wanted to discuss the things that bothered me in day-to-day life as an aromantic asexual person in the hope that maybe someone else would read my words and feel like they had an ally, or at least a little comfort. But I also wanted to comfort myself.

It was that idea that kept me going while I worked to launch this blog last year, and when I finally clicked “publish” on that very first post, I felt beyond proud. Naturally, I chose Valentine’s Day because it’s a day that can feel the most alienating when you’re non-sexual or non-romantic, and it felt like a little win, a little way to carve out a small space just for me and people like me in a world that’s not built for us. But today is something else too, something that relates to this theme of using my voice so astonishingly well that it’s not at all an exaggeration to say it profoundly changed my life. The entire reason I’m writing this post is to mark the one-year anniversary of this blog’s inception, but today also marks the one-year anniversary of something else very dear to me – it’s been one year of being a fan of BTS.

As I mentioned in a previous BTS-specific post, I found BTS accidentally and, although their music helped me overcome my doubts and anxieties while launching this blog, the thing that impacted me the most actually happened the evening of my blog launch when the work was already finished. In celebration of a job well done, I sat down to enjoy a guilt-free binge of some of the band’s different videos and unintentionally came across a video of their 2018 speech to the United Nations. With the rest of the band behind him, I watched as the group’s leader, Kim Namjoon (RM) stepped up to the microphone and told a story about finding his own voice. He began by discussing his childhood and how he went from an imaginative child to a young boy who worried what others thought of him. He discussed how he lost his own voice by listening to the voices of others and trying to conform to their standards. By not speaking his true beliefs and feelings, he says in the speech, he felt as though he lost his identity.

For Namjoon, unsurprisingly, the thing that helped him rediscover his voice was music, but it didn’t magically make everything easier. Not only was the process to “hear music calling [his] real name” a lengthy one, but becoming a member of BTS is something he describes as having “a lot of hurdles,” leading to the temptation to just walk away. But he discusses too how he stuck with it and how, over the years, he has come to love his past, current, and future selves, despite the mistakes he’s made and may continue to make in the future. The theme of “love yourself” is a central one to BTS’s music and messaging, but in this speech, Namjoon adds an important addition, which he calls taking “one more step.” “We have learned to love ourselves,” he says, “so now I urge you to speak yourself… what excites you and makes your heart beat? Tell me your story. I want to hear your voice and I want to hear your conviction. No matter who you are, where you’re from, your skin color, your gender identity, just speak yourself. Find your name and find your voice by speaking yourself.”

Without even knowing it, I had taken his advice – this blog was my vehicle for speaking myself. And over the course of this year, something incredible happened: with the blog as my outlet and BTS’s music as a safe haven, I found myself becoming less bitter about the things that had previously trapped me. In many ways, in all those moments when I was letting people limit me, I, like Namjoon says in his speech, had stopped listening to my voice and started listening to the voices of others. But slowly, as I worked through this blog, I felt myself caring less about the bad things I saw and started focusing more on how I could move forward, about how I could love myself and speak myself. I’m not saying those bad things never affected me – there were still plenty of topics I covered on this blog that annoyed me, or moments in TV shows that were aphobic enough to prompt me to leave the room (because self love is choosing not to sit through nonsense if you don’t have to). But because I had this outlet, because I felt like I was speaking myself in a way I never had, I felt like I was able to bounce back a lot faster than I might have once. And above all, I began to feel like these moments of misunderstanding at best and condemnation at worse weren’t sticking to me as much anymore.

That, I think, is what it truly means to speak yourself and why it’s so important. It goes beyond just saying what’s on your mind, but rather reaches into saying what makes you who you are, saying it confidently and no matter what comes. It means saying it for your own benefit as well as the benefit of others. And above all, it means believing it and living by it. It means realizing your voice isn’t just how you sound like I thought when I was young, but rather the truth that what you say and who you are is valuable, unique, and vital. For some people, it’s not possible to speak yourself in this or other ways, maybe because it’s dangerous, or because doing so will be damaging to your mental health, or any number of other reasons – and that’s okay. You don’t owe your story to anyone, but it’s vital that each and every person knows that their story is an important and precious one regardless, and that you have a voice. Finding and cultivating that voice in due time is one of the most important things in life, I feel. It’s not a race, nor is it a straight line. As Namjoon says in his UN speech, there will still be times where we “keep stumbling and falling,” but the important part is to keep going.

Today, I’m looking back – to the me who felt like I had just pulled off the ultimate “fake-it-till-you-make-it” moment, to the me who was astonished to find her life’s mission summed up by a South Korean rapper, to the me who didn’t know how much growth she was about to embrace in her life and how much growth there is still to do. But I am also looking forward. In so many ways, I still lack confidence. In so many ways, I am still looking for myself. But as Namjoon says at the end of his speech, “I have many faults and I have many more fears, but I’m going to embrace myself as hard as I can, and I’m starting to love myself gradually, just little by little.”

At the end of the day, I know there will be moments when I struggle or when my efforts to speak myself feel like they’ve fallen on deaf ears or where it feels like I’m walking the path alone. And maybe I am, since all our paths are unique. But this speech is not the only time the band talks about the theme of “voice.” In fact, it’s a theme in a number of their songs, including Namjoon’s own solo song “Persona,” (slight language warning) which contains one of my favorite lines: “I just want to give you all the voices ‘till I die, I just want to give you all the shoulders when you cry.” The notion of speaking even when no one can hear you is also a theme BTS plays with in a song (lyrics here; language warning) about “the loneliest whale in the world” – an actual whale documented to sing at a frequency no other whale can hear. These concepts and these words give me hope because they show that it’s important to speak even when you’re speaking alone, even when you’re not entirely sure anyone else can hear you. And even if they never do, you should speak anyway, because only you have your voice and your story.

In that way, I believe truly being yourself means to trust who you are, to believe in what you think, feel, do, and say. I’m not saying life will always be easy if you believe in yourself and cherish the authentic parts of who you are – if anything, discovering my aspec identity makes so many things harder – but it’s so much better than the alternative. You cannot live in a world where you “shut out your own voice and start listening to the voices of others.” You cannot live in a world where you lose your name and become a ghost, as Namjoon describes. So many of us have, but we don’t need to. For a long time, singing a song no one else could sing felt like a sad and frightening failure, but I have come to embrace it instead as who I am and what I do.

As I write this now, it feels like I’m getting ready to take that “one more step,” or at least preparing myself for it. I have spent a whole year speaking my truth on this blog and I plan to spend at least one more doing so too. But beyond that, I’m ready to go even further when it comes to speaking myself, and when it comes to how I relate to the world around me. I am ready to identify the places where I still let people rob me of my voice or where I live in fear of what other people will think of me, and will do my best to rise above them. Something I’ve learned over the course of this year is how much I actually do worry about what others think of me, as Namjoon says in his speech – an emotion I thought I had long since grown out of. But rather than let that rob me of my voice, my name, and my identity, I want to move forward by letting these things affirm who I am and what I can offer, as well as inspire me to think about all the things I can achieve.

One year ago today I asked you all to come on this little journey with me, and RM of BTS asked me to speak myself. For those two reasons, Valentine’s Day 2020 will always be etched into my mind. It’s a holiday of love, but from now on February 14th is far from being a day of discomfort and annoyance; it will now always be a day when I remember how to love and speak myself. This year, as I embrace this holiday of love in a new way, I hope all of us can think about these themes, and think about love from a new lens in general. I’ve noticed a bit of a trend this year to do just that, with advertisements focusing less on romance and focusing more on love of all kinds, whether familial love or friendship or even the love we have for our pets. It makes me think that picking Valentine’s Day as the day to launch my blog, and thus the day to always celebrate the themes of self love and honoring my voice, was maybe the best decision I could have made.

So, whoever you are and whatever you’re doing on this Valentine’s Day, my wish for you is whatever kind of love you need most in your life, and that above all, you learn to love your voice, your story, and yourself in ways you never have before. And I hope you’ll be with me when I celebrate this blog’s second anniversary next year at this time, as we once again ask ourselves the question of who we are and find the answer (or something close to it) in the ability to speak ourselves.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart, as always.

With platonic love,

- Rachel, aka The Asexual Geek