The Wheel of Fortune
On the Nature of Things Going Up, and Things Going Down (Or: “Is this Sexual Attraction?”)
Aces and aros often talk about what differentiates them from others who experience normative sexual or romantic attraction to others (what the community often refers to as allosexuality — the experience of sexual attraction towards others). However, people on the asexual and the aromantic spectrum do share some great, cosmic underlying truths with allosexuals, whether they be straight or in the wider queer community: They are all subject to the whims of fate. No more is this readily apparent than on social media.
One day you may find yourself in the eye of a whirlwind of attention on social media, your Tweets racking up likes and retweets like there’s no tomorrow. The next, you may find yourself at the unfortunate business end of a Twitter mob hell-bent on cancelling you over something said off-handedly, or carelessly without any forethought. One day, you may find yourself reveling in the sunshine of attention from a new community, workplace or group you’ve encountered. The next, you may find yourself tearfully fleeing it over awkward or anxiety-inducing community drama — or you may find yourself quitting in disgust over unaddressed and unacknowledged instances of racism, ableism queerphobia, aphobia, or transphobia.
Either way, you’d be forgiven if you’d ask yourself, “My God, how did I get here?”
One of the oldest versions of the tarot Wheel of Fortune, seen in a deck that actually predates the earliest versions of the Tarot de Marseilles (the Visconti Tarot), depicts the Wheel of Fortune as an actual wheel, turned over and over by Fate herself in the middle, seemingly by hand. One moment, one may be a prince, the next, the king, and then suddenly find themselves falling precipitously off the wheel altogether — with all of your privilege, power and possessions all totally and completely gone.
Some of that imagery is repeated here in the Smith-Waite tarot, with various mythological creatures on different stages of the wheel: ascending, at the top, and descending. The enigmatic letters T, A, R, O can actually be read in many different ways, but the fact that the O flows into the leading T to spell “TAROT” reminds us of the cyclical nature of life (and how the balance of this cycle is centred in the tarot itself). The tetragrammaton spelled out in the four interspersed Hebrew letters — interpreted as the letters spelling out the name of God — additionally remind us that we can see a divine, or at least a cosmic, spiritual force behind this cycle. To more broadly spiritual, less Judeo-Christian eyes, this suggests that for every moment we enjoy on our trajectory upward, we also inevitably wind up enduring and confronting moments of being cast down. When Spirit, or the Universe gives us warnings about these coming events, we ignore them at our own peril.
When I think of this card, I think about cycles, and how the “good” points in our life flow in to the “bad”, and vice-versa; how every moment of darkness is balanced out by the moments of light (this again speaks to the overarching theme of balance in the tarot). When we find ourselves on the falling side of the wheel, we may just as quickly find ourselves arising on its ascending side once again. The importance then, is more than just the classic motto attributed to Winston Churchill, who declared that “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.” It’s about trying to understand what lesson you were supposed to learn when you were in the process of falling in the last cycle; it’s about ultimately (hopefully) learning from your mistakes so you won’t repeat them again. And again. And again. This can be especially true if you are like me: Someone who ends up needing to live through a given critical life lesson multiple times before finally getting it.
For ace and aro people, The Wheel of Fortune can be more than just a simple matter of “What goes us, must come down”, though: It’s also a reminder that in our journeys as aces, aros and as queer people, there are going to be rough points. Times will be tough, especially if you are in a position where you are actively seeking, or at least contemplating seeking a partner (whether that be in a romantic dating sense, or in queerplatonic relationship). Regardless of what happens, we have to keep going. And we can remember that during the rough points, there is a potential for lessons and insights to be learned that can both help us to better enjoy the ride going up, and better cushion the fall when we go down.
It really is important to remember that “regardless of what happens” part, because in life — queer, asexual, or not — the unexpected can always happen. Perhaps a strong same-sex attraction shakes our foundational assumption that we are heterosexual or heteroromantic. Perhaps a strong attraction develops with a close friend with whom you’ve spent a lot of time, prompting you to reexamine where or how you fit on the asexual or aromantic spectrum. A time-honoured home-spun tradition on the Internet is the creation of pop culture and anime-inspired memes made by aces and aros trying to understand where their sudden and unexpected attractions to others fits in the grand scheme of their identity. And that’s all okay. It’s all valid. It is easy to view such changes as things to be feared, but change is one of the constants of a queered life. You may actually be at a point in your journey where asexuality is the best fit for you, but time, and experience may lead you to another sexual identity, or another label, or microlabel. You may be at a point in your journey where you are completely confident in your asexuality or aromanticism. Or you may not even identify as ace or aro at all, only to find yourself suddenly at a place where your sexual or gender identity strongly intersects and resonates with the experience of being asexual or aromantic. You may even find yourself, after a succession of relationships, realizing that sexual desire, or even romantic love wasn’t what you were experiencing towards your partners at all.
This is reflected in some of the more fluid identities on the asexual spectrum: Aceflux and Aroflux both recognize the capacity for people to shift in their place on the ace and aro spectrums, such as those who find themselves gravitating from a place more angled towards sexual attraction, to one that is more narrowly asexual — and vice-versa. Other labels created to help define this space include Aceflexible, or Quoisexual (aka WTFsexual), a label that can be used to describe being in a state where the process of questioning and moving one’s place in asexuality can be an identity in and of itself.
Expanding our focus further is the phenomenon of someone’s ace or aro journey being a major component of how they become aware of their shifting and changing sexuality in other ways. In a journey that has largely mirrored my own, some write about how their experience of coming into their demsexuality played a huge part of their journey to come out as bi+. A group led by researchers Canton Winer, Megan Carrol, and Yuchen Yang recently released an important paper that as speaks to this interaction, showing how bisexuality and pansexuality can form a pathway to establishing an identity as ace — and for many, it happens not in a way where identifying as ace replaces identifying as bi+, but where identifying as ace can emerge as something that closely associates with — and complements — identifying as bi or pan.
All of these are valid places in the queer community and in the asexual and aromantic community, to be respected, understood, included, and defended. While the Fool’s Journey seen in the Major Arcana of the Smith-Waite tarot is a linear progression, the story it tells is itself not one that is linear in its path. So too is our journey on both the material and spiritual plane of existence to become better, more integrated beings. In tools like the tarot, our culture seems to acknowledge that we are on dynamic paths of emotional and psychological development. Is it not then only fair to say that our sexual selves are on a similar voyage too? Our culture is seemingly so fixated on narrowly defined, rigidly-set gender and sexual identities that we often fail to see that our sexuality need not be seen as a final end goal, but the journey in and of itself. A sacred journey to be celebrated in its moments of confidence and solidity, even if it is marked with periods of seemingly random instability.
Such are the aspects of the journey we take to better understand and love our sexual selves. In the meantime, the wheel will keep on turning, and life will go on. It may not be alright right now, but as long as we keep going, it really is going to be okay.
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