Who Am I? Anonymous

“So, you’re like a plant, right?”

Yep, exactly. My name is Katia, my favorite color is aubergine, and I’m secretly a plant because I don’t experience sexual attraction. How did you know?

I found out I was asexual the summer after sophomore year. For years, I had defined myself largely by compulsory heterosexuality. I had rather forced crushes on boys, and certainly didn’t “look at girls the same way boys looked at girls,” as every lesbian YA novel phrases it. As I’d gone to Catholic school for the past ten years, there was no sex ed, and my best friend realized I should know the basics. My friend was a witty, fierce girl who I’d met on our school’s tennis team, who’d grown up self-confident in an artistic mecca that was a local Waldorf school, empowered in ways of sexuality where I was not. She told me what sexual attraction felt like, and slowly it all made sense. I’d never checked anyone out; I hadn’t had romantic dreams about anyone in middle school; I’d gone along with saving myself for marriage. Maybe I wasn’t as straight as I thought I was, and I was strangely okay with that. It felt realer to me than the black-and-white of sexual orientation I’d been introduced to before, the gay or straight dichotomy.

I embraced my new...