Growing up as an asexual in an over sexualised world can be very challenging. For a start, you don’t know who you are because you never hear the word asexual in your every day life and if it gets mentioned on TV it’s hardly an open-minded look upon it, so it sounds ‘wrong’.
For my part, I’d never heard the word ‘asexual’ until June 2011 be used in any different context other than to describe amoebas reproduction. So forget about asexuality as a sexual orientation.
Of course, you grow up knowing that you’re different, and that you don’t feel the way your friends do. You shy away at things that amuse them, and don’t understand their talks about someone being ‘hot’.
You grow up thinking you’re weird, ill, and abnormal. You never talk about it. You daren’t, besides how can you talk about something when you don’t even know what it is ? You keep on believing that some day soon all those feelings your friends are talking about are suddenly going to appear. But, they don’t…
In the end you end up stumbling across the term asexual on the internet, or by typing some words in Google search bar, or by over-hearing people talking and curiosity/instinct incites you to look it up. And then it hits you. You’re so relieved to find that you’re not on your own and to finally discover that you are normal.
Luckily some people are trying to bring more visibility to asexuality, such as David Jay founder of AVEN, so that in future people will no longer have to worry about ‘not feeling what their friends’ feel, and so that people begin to accept asexuality as a real orientation.
