What if the most dangerous thing you ever wrote was simply the truth?
For so many of us, survival meant learning to split ourselves in two—the version the world could handle, and the version we buried deep inside. In the inaugural episode of Embracing All of Me, Ross Victory sits down with bisexual Mexican American writer Aaron H. Aceves, author of This Is Why They Hate Us, for a conversation that reaches into that buried place. For Aaron, writing began as survival, became self-discovery, and finally transformed into a refusal to disappear.
Aaron’s debut novel arrived urgently, as if the character had been waiting to breathe. “Sometimes the scariest thing is simply letting the story exist,” Ross reflects, a truth that echoes throughout. Writing a queer, bi+ protagonist before being fully out to his family meant choosing between the safety of silence and the risk of being seen.
Then came the turning point: “I had to care more about getting this book out than what my grandma was going to think.” That sentence lands like a quiet manifesto—not dismissing the cost of disappointing loved ones, but acknowledging an even greater cost: the slow erasure that comes from never telling your truth.
The episode reveals how characters can say what we’re not yet ready to say ourselves. Through fiction, Aaron explored bisexuality not as confusion to resolve, but as lived, complicated truth. For bi+ people of color whose stories are routinely omitted, this kind of writing becomes a method to reclaim and resist being flattened.
If you’ve ever wondered whether your story is “too much” to tell, this episode offers an answer. The stories that frighten us most are often the ones that need to exist. Because somewhere, someone is waiting for proof they’re not alone.