But hereās why itās so important.
Between the formative ages of 8 to 13, I watched Bill Nye the Science Guy air on PBS in my cable-TV-lacking childhood home. It taught me, albeit in kid-friendly simplified terms, about principles of physics and experimentation, the scientific method and chemical reactions, planetary movement and Bunsen burner usage. There are naysayers out there, probably the same people who shit on Mythbusters, and while I get it, I also want to say: just shut up and let the rest of us have fun. Bill Nye was A Real Scientist on TV, and he made complex things accessible to young, impressionable, eager minds. Like me.
Even before Bill Nye the Science Guy went to reruns, I knew I didnāt see people the way everyone else seemed to. By fifth grade, my friend was pointing to a yearbook photo of a classmate sheād taped to the wall above her bed and asking me, āIsnāt he hot??ā And I had no idea how to respond. Was he hot? What made him hot? Were other people hot? What did hot even mean? Why couldnāt I identify this elusive physical trait?
By junior high, I thought I might be broken. By high school, I knew it for sure.
I took more science classes than my schooling required. I signed up for after-school nature clubs. I got a perfect score on the science section of the state standardized assessment.
I dated exactly once. The guy went to my church and asked me out after the service. I asked my mom first if it was okay. I had no idea what the hell a dating relationship was supposed to be like. I can only imagine he didnāt either, because we were together for a full year before we first held hands. We never kissed, and I broke up with him because I didnāt know what I was supposed to feel, but I wasnāt feeling anything, and that didnāt seem right. He cried. I mostly just felt bad about it.
In college, I did the thing all socially-outskirted people do and took psychology courses, because maybe that would shed some light. It didnāt.
I had a weird almost-relationship with my best friend. We had an intense emotional connection, and she ended up being my first kiss. The shame borne from gay-is-abominable indoctrination chewed me up from the inside until I hit the self-destruct button on that relationship, too. It didnāt go well.
Not only was I broken, I was someone who actively hurt people. Clearly I was not meant for this.
There was this one guy, though, a roommate of a friend of a roommate, who kept trying. He wasnāt creepy or pushy about it; he just kept quietly being there, patient and constant, a friend before anything else. I had no interest. Until I did. But that was a problem, because I was broken and I hurt people who wanted that with me. He waited. When I eventually closed my eyes and jumped, he caught me.
I did screw things up a little in the middle. But still he waited. He was a very patient guy. We took an astronomy course together. I married him.
Being from religious backgrounds, we both abstained from anything sexual until the wedding night. That was easy for me. I didnāt understand why everyone else found it so hard to just not stick things or have things stuck. That kind of thing took a lot of conscious effort! And it was messy! And tiring! And it kind of hurt. No matter; it would get easier with practice. And I was sure that mythical āsex driveā would show up any day now. That would set everything right.
It didnāt show up. Not that first week, or first month. I talked to my gynecologist - maybe it was the brand of birth control Iād started taking shortly before the wedding. I switched pills. Nobody told me I should have used a backup method during the first month, because I guess everyone else had that figured out ten years ago, and a newlywed wouldnāt need to be informed. I bought a pack of pregnancy tests in a panic. They were all negative.
I didnāt want to be pregnant. The thought of carrying a child in my body and giving birth was so off-putting to me that I fantasized about discovering I was infertile. Penetrative sex still didnāt feel good. There I was, still broken.
Webcomics and RSS feeds were how I entertained myself during slower hours of my STEM career. In one of the comics, a side character was dating someone but not having sex.
The word āasexualā crossed my radar for the very first time.
I was 26, married and salaried, and all of a sudden I was not simply broken. There were other people like me. It changed everything.
It took over 3 years for me to (re)learn enough about myself and what asexuality was to build up the courage to tell my husband.
But he is a patient guy, when it comes down to it. Weāll be celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary soon. I still feel broken sometimes, but Iām working on it.
It is 2017 and Iām going to be 32 years old. I have heard asexuality referenced in mainstream media exactly three times. One was on a show I didnāt watch, but vaguely saw stuff about online. One was an interview with the creator of a series, where one character was referenced as being āplayed somewhat asexual.ā And one was my childhood science hero talking about spectrums of sexual attraction just now, on a grown-up reboot of the show I adored two decades ago.
Bill Nye Saves the World had me at the first episode. Itās an adult, politically-charged version of the public media that so lovingly nurtured my scientific Vulcan brain before I ever knew that girls werenāt encouraged in this stuff. Its tone is frank and exasperated; its āexperimentsā flashy and over-simplified (with verbal explosion sounds and mad scientist cackles thrown in for fun). Bill Nye is an entertainer, but he also has some legit cred, and is one of the most outspoken voices against the current political and cultural climate of science denial.
Bill Nye doesnāt think Iām broken.
He said it exactly the way heād say water is a liquid, or that the sky is blue or the Earth is slightly off-round. It was a statement of fact, that I exist and I am not an abnormality. I am recognized. I am real. I am not broken.
