What Human Means For Me

Hey! This is my entry for the Modern Love Contest. Title comes from For Me by Dearlie.

This one is kinda personal, but the prompt was to write about your understanding of love, so here it is. It's not technically a story so much as my personal experience.

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I was sixteen years old when I first heard the word that would become so important to me. I didn't really think about it too much at the time, it was just a comment made by a friend, and we immediately moved onto a different topic.

However, when I saw it again two years later, I decided to take a closer look. I did some digging on the internet, and eventually found a Reddit page on the subject, including a definition of the word.

Asexuality is defined as having little to no sexual attraction to any person, regardless of gender.

I could not believe how much this word resonated with me. My whole life I had thought that something must be wrong with me, especially as I got older and all my friends started dating and talking about their crushes and asking me about mine. I thought my brain was broken somehow.

But to learn that what I felt was not an anomaly, that there were others out there?

It was the best feeling in the world.

I immediately started doing research, sitting at my laptop for hours, and reading about the experiences of different people who identified as asexual. My research uncovered a lot of information that I found fascinating, such as the difference between asexuality as its own sexuality and as an umbrella term for people on a whole spectrum of similar but different identities.

I discovered aromanticism, which did not resonate with me the way asexuality did but was still interesting and was on a spectrum of its own. I soon started reading about all different types of sexualities, even one's that I knew I did not identify with, in the hopes of better understanding people and the world around me.

Knowing what I do now about myself and how I feel things differently than most, I can look back at my past and see when I had romantic crushes on guys that I just never recognized. I had been looking for the signs everyone else described to me, and I could only recognize those crushes after realizing most of those would not apply to me.

Instead, I had to focus on the happiness I felt when talking to them, and the way I always looked forward to seeing them next. It took some time to recognize those signs in myself, but I'm now confident that next time I have a crush I'll be able to recognize it much quicker.

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So... I hope you liked reading my thoughts on the subject of love and how it applies to me specifically. I left out a couple of points that I couldn't fit into the word count, but the important stuff is all in there. Let me know if you wanna hear more.

~clarinetily