Growing up asexual

You are twelve and your best friend kisses you the day before moving away. He’s nervous and shy, and the kiss is soft, but there are no sparks and no butterflies in your stomach. You are left feeling weird and uncomfortable, like there’s something wrong with you.

You are thirteen and your classmates talk about their crushes and how much they want to kiss them. You listen from a corner but don’t join the conversation. You don’t have a crush on anyone, you wouldn’t want any of their mouthes close to yours, so you can’t add anything to it. One of them still turns around and asks you about your crush. No one believes you when you say no one. The next day there is a rumor that you love one of your friends.

You are fourteen and come back home to find your living room busy with relatives. You join them and for a while everything seems fine, everyone is talking about embarrasing moments, and telling funny stories, and saying lame jokes. But then one of your aunts smiles conspirationally and winks at the other adults, and starts questioning you.

“You must have a boyfriend, someone as pretty as you!” She beams, and everyone gathered agrees. “So tell us, who is your boyfriend? Who do you like?”

You try to laugh it off and get out, and feel uncomfortable about it all, but they keep asking and keep asking and so you say the first name that comes into your mind (because your classmates didn’t believe you and you almost lost a friend because of it). That satisfies them for now and they all commend you for your good taste. No one notices you slipping out of the room until much later, and they all think it’s because you’re a teen now.

(Not one of them thinks that maybe they made you uncomfortable. No one thinks that maybe you would rather not talk about things like this.)

You are fifteen and have resigned yourself to the feelings of isolation. Your friends talk about masturbating, about sex, about the hot people in the class. Your classmates still ask you who you are crushing on. Sometimes you say a random name, and sometimes you claim to be too busy with your homework to worry about love (which seems to be a good enough excuse), but in the privacy of your mind you still wonder.

You look at women, trying to feel any sort of attraction towards them. You even try kissing a friend, but you feel absolutely nothing. You conclude that you can’t be neither homosexual nor bisexual. The logical leap to this is that you must be hetero, since those are the only options.

You try to make yourself fall in love with a boy, then. You stare at the so-called cute boy of your class for hours, waiting for the magical spark to appear. You try to make yourself love a boy based on his clothing. You try to understand what the hell is it that people are talking about.

You waste days, weeks, months on this task. You never succeed.

You are sixteen and you know you are broken. People still ask you about love and sex and crushes, and you still lie for fear of being different, of being alienated, of feeling even more isolated than you already do. You know you will have to marry one day, because marriage is mandatory no matter what you feel. So you resign yourself to pretending, to keep up the act. You try and keep trying not to let it bother you, but the idea of sex, of marriage, of love, all of it makes your stomach churn. You try to pretend you aren’t broken, but you know you are.

You are seventeen when you first see the word asexual, somewhere on the internet. You end up looking that word up, and find a website dedicated to it. There are hundreds upon hundreds of comments in the forums, but you first read the FAQs.

‘Asexuality is not feeling sexual attraction’, you read out loud, barely a whisper, as something inside of you clicks. It makes sense. It makes sense but you ignore it, and convince yourself that you do feel it (because there was that boy you thought looked pretty and that girl you considered cute), and you think the only reason why you don’t really fall in love and want sex is because you are broken. You know this to be true.

You close all of the tabs related to that word. For the next weeks you pretend to never have found it, but it’s always at the back of your mind.

(It’s a chance of being whole, your mind whispers, and you deny it because you are normal. You’ve been trying to be normal for so many years and you must be, have to be, will be…)

Asexuality fits with your life. You are broken, but maybe you aren’t alone.

You are eighteen, and you are more informed now. You have accepted that you are asexual (ace, as the community calls it), and you are somehow much happier now. You know you aren’t broken, now. You know this is an option that was never presented to you before.

You finally come out to your family, feeling safe and secure and confident in your knowledge. Your family laughs. They say that asexuality doesn’t exist, that it’s impossible not to feel sexual attraction. They tell you that you are too young, that you’ll find the right person, not to worry, as if your biggest worry was to not fall in love, instead of not succeding in life. They act like idiots and apologize when it’s too late, and even as you accept their apologies your mind keeps whispering (but what if they are right, what if it’s true, what if you are too young, what if you are faking it, what if, what if)

Your family refers to asexuality as ‘that thing’, and they never ask you questions about it. It becomes an unspoken thing. Something that must never be talked about.

Sometimes you feel like crying, but you don’t really know why.

You are nineteen when you come out to your friends. You have put a wall around the fiasco with your family, and you explain everything to them. Your friends are open-minded about it and agree that it fits with your behaviour. They ask you questions and joke about it, but always make sure not to be offensive. You smile all thorought the afternoon, and even once you get home.

A few weeks later one of your friends tells you they are terrified of the idea of being like you, or becoming like you. They say, with concern and real worry in their eyes, that they wouldn’t be able to live a life like yours, so uninteresting, so lonely. You tell them not to worry and don’t even cry about it. But there is a heavy feeling in your chest and a knot in your throat.

You are twenty and the world exhaustes you sometimes. You get tired of watching sex and romance be such an important part of the plots of your favourite movies and TV shows. You are tired of being told in very subtle ways that your orientation isn’t valid. You are tired of the looming threat of corrective rape, of people who hate on you for your sexuality, of stupid jokes and stupid tropes. You are tired of them all.

But you are also twenty and understand that you aren’t broken. You know you aren’t alone. So you wear your ace ring with pride and wear the colors of the flag during the awareness week, and are ready to talk about it with anyone who listens. You are tired of being silenced, so you will yell until you get hoarse if that’s what it takes for the world to listen.

You are twenty, and you accept yourself, and even if things get rough, they can also get better.

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