Carnival of Aros has offered a series of prompts on the subject of aromantic spectrum awareness week. I thought I would start with writing my thoughts on the future of ASAW.
To be honest while I have wanted to get more involved in this I am kind of aro’d out at the moment. I already administrate arocalypse, participate in carnival of aros, regularly attend an aro online meetup and have been doing some volunteering for AUREA (mainly narrating some of their articles).
So while I can in principle do some things, in practice there is a limited amount of my life I can give up to make events like this good. I know my limits and I know if I really threw myself into arranging something special for aro week I would have to cut back on the other things I do so as not to burn out. It seems like since aromanticism as a community is so small there are other people in this situation. We simply struggle to put things on for aro week because we need to take care of our own lives and not burn ourselves out in the community. When we are in the community its always people already taking on so many other things. I suppose some of this is expected, 80:20 and all that, but in such a small group we really do struggle with this.
So my big hope for the future is just to have some more bodies to get things done. Imagine if AUREA could just say, right, we are having a few volunteers who just focus on preparing things for ASAW, no need to help us with anything else, that is just your thing. Or imagine if carnival of aros had enough manpower to prepare something like a series of writing challenges. I dont think we are that far away from this, in principle a few dozen people connected with aro organisations online could add a lot more to aro week, but every person we add we seem to lose someone else, and everyone we do gain is needed for the many other things we want to do.
So that is my hope, just a few more hands with the time to focus most of their attention just on making aro week better.
Roboticanary 