Broken Toy Robot


For most of my life, I’ve felt like a robot. I don’t mean one of those robots that seem to be practically human from television shows and movies, with amazing human-like features which allow them to almost blend in with human life. What I mean, is one of those robots that you get out of the toy aisle and when you take it out of its box turns out it’s dysfunctional. It moves loudly, slowly, wobbly and the voice is distorted. The kind you usually put right back in the package and return to the store for a refund because it doesn’t have any use. Growing up, emotionally I was rather robotic, never excited when I should be, sad when I should be, never expressive enough. My family used to tease me, claiming I was autistic and this was something that made me angry for a number of years. I felt like everyone could see as I fumbled along the bumpy terrain of human expression and interaction, coming to jarring halts and falling when it should have been smooth. Beyond this, I struggled with depression, anxiety, and emotional issues, but I think what broke the camel’s back was when I started to have questions about my sexuality. 
  
At 13, I began to suspect that maybe I wasn’t “normal”;  my sister and all of our friends would talk about crushes they had on boys, I never did. At the time, I thought that this indicated there was something wrong with me, girls were supposed to have crushes on boys, they were supposed to think about kissing boys, dating boys, and have detailed dreams of the wedding they would one day have. It was at this point that I tried to force myself to have a crush on someone because I couldn’t accept that there was one more area in my life where I marched to an entirely different rhythm than the norm, where I didn’t fit into the jigsaw of society. In the end, when my sister and a friend of ours “accidentally” let slip that I “had a crush” on the individual I was pretending to have a crush on I freaked out. I’m not sure what scared me more, the awkwardness of the situation or the fear of it being revealed that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t feel for this boy the way my sister and our friends felt about their crushes. As I entered high school, I continued to delude myself by trying to convince myself of multiple crushes. Every time a guy did something even remotely nice, every time a social situation with a guy made me blush, I tried to convince myself that it meant I liked him, but deep down I knew I didn’t and I never would.

It wasn’t long until I started to suspect that maybe I didn’t like boys, I had always been able to appreciate how girls looked just as much as I had with boys, and often found myself leaning towards the company of other females, so I thought this meant I had to be a gay. This shook me to my core because I went to a Christian school with books that denounced homosexuality, I had religious friends, religious parents, and I knew at least one of my grandparents was homophobic. I was terrified, I wasn’t sure how they would react, and I wasn’t sure how my being gay could fit with my religion. I remember the small amount of faith I had at that point teetered on the edge that with one soft blow it would have disappeared altogether.  What was the point of believing in and following a God that hated me for something I had absolutely no control over? After a while, I opened up to the one person at the time that I knew would always love me and would never leave me no matter what, my sister. I cried as I spilled everything I was feeling, all my fears, and all my insecurities to her. She told me that being gay didn’t mean I couldn’t believe in God and my faith didn’t have to rely on the misguided beliefs of others. That if God doesn’t love someone simply because they are gay meant he couldn’t truly love anyone because it wasn’t something they could control it was simply the way they were born. Liking girls didn’t hurt anyone, so why should God care if I liked girls, why should anyone care?

After the conversation with my sister, I started to feel a little more comfortable with the idea of being attracted to girls. This experience changed my perspective on a lot of factors about religion and social issues; issues which I normally just avoided, now I tried to be much more proactive. I decided that I would shape my beliefs on the basis of what I felt was right in my heart, instead of what the people around me wanted me to believe, simply because that is how it has always been done. However, my feelings of conflict and confusion didn’t end there because I started to realize that I wasn’t sexually attracted to girls or boys. 

The idea of not feeling sexual attraction at all was something that confused me because I thought I had to be attracted to either or both, there was no option that I had ever heard of being attracted to none. Science told me that humans are sexual beings, and the idea of not being interested in sex and not experiencing sexual attraction wasn’t ever mentioned. My whole life I had felt like a broken toy robot, my sister once joked bitterly that by some freak incident of nature she must have left her brains behind for me and she must have stolen all the emotions that were supposed to be mine. Friends and classmates had joked about me being heartless because I never seemed to respond emotionally the way they thought I should or when I should. This was just another thing, another piece of proof that there was something wrong with me; I was more robot than human and no matter how hard I tried to show them that I really did have emotions, that I just didn’t know how to express them, that I was just another person, I would never be able to because there was something missing and wrong about me and I thought everyone could tell.  

My depression peaked and I contemplated suicide more seriously than I ever had before. It was in the midst of this conflict that I lost my sister, the one person I felt would accept me and love me no matter what. No matter how many times we fought and regardless of our differences, she was the constant in my life and she was gone. I took to the solace of the internet, unwilling to burden my friends and family, I sought distraction. It was at this point that I discovered the concept of asexuality. I remember the feeling of absolute relief when I realized that maybe my “programming” wasn’t messed up at all and, more importantly, I was not broken and I was not alone. 

My whole life I felt like a broken, toy robot. I felt out of place like I didn’t fit in with the rest of society. Over the years, I have changed quite dramatically, I went from a seemingly emotionless shell of a person to someone who cries during emotional commercials. But most importantly I realized that there isn’t one simple way to be a human being. We are not all the same and we don’t all function the same way, to keep with the theme, we all have slightly different programming. My not being like the people around me doesn’t make me any less human, it simply means that we are different. I think that is one of the reasons representation and community is so important because there are other kids other people out there who feel like they don’t fit in the puzzle of humanity because they feel like they are so different from the majority of people around them. They need a community that shows them they are not alone and positive representation to help them feel worthwhile and valid … Don’t give me a stereotypical trope that feeds the feelings of being out of place. Reach out to the broken, toy robots of the world, to the people who have been told they don’t fit in the story and make them feel real again. We are all pieces of a bigger puzzle and at first it may seem we don’t belong, but just because you aren’t a side piece with a clear place doesn’t mean you don’t have a place. Everyone has a place and without each person, each group, and even each societal oddity the puzzle of the world is incomplete.

Image belongs to Disney Pixar

Comments