Coming out ended up being a fairly complicated process for me. As my friends started discussing crushes and maneuvering for kisses, all I felt was a vague confusion. I didn’t see anything to get excited about. As I went through high school, watching people pair off, hearing rumors about who was sleeping with who, I felt alienated. I was the weird one who didn’t understand the jokes, who never went out, who never kissed anyone—and never wanted to.
By the time I went to college, I’d decided I was probably bisexual. I liked looking at both guys and girls, liked making someone I thought was cute laugh. So that’s what I told all my friends. But I froze up whenever anyone hinted at feelings for me, just wanted to run away when I got asked on dates. Somehow I just couldn’t even process the idea of a relationship, of being with someone, of having sex. I thought it was all great in the abstract, but it didn’t compute when I tried to visualize myself involved.
I owe the discovery of a label I liked for myself to a friend with an obsession with Sherlock Holmes and the TV Tropes website. Not the most conventional of sources, perhaps, but I cried when I read the description of asexuality linked to on the page. As I watched the way my friends were, the way my family was, the way everyone I saw on tv and in movies was, and realized I didn’t feel any of those things, it was hard not to feel like I was broken, like there was something about me that was missing, that needed to be fixed. Finding out that there are other people like me, that we had a word for it, that it was an identity that I could claim, was amazing. I’m an aromatic asexual, and I’m finally comfortable with myself.
I’ve been slowly coming out since then. Its not an easy process, since I usually have to start by explaining what asexuality is, and that yes it’s a real thing, and no I don’t think I just haven’t met the right person yet, and no, really, I don’t need medical treatment. But for as rough as the first conversation often is, I’ve gotten a lot of support from friends and family. I’ve met a great community of people