Everything I Know About Myself, I Learned Too Late

I have always believed that words matter.

This is probably not surprising to anyone who knows even a little about me – I’ve been keeping my nose in a book since I was 4; I studied languages; I became a writer. So, I spend a large part of my life thinking about whether one word works better than another, whether a sentence sounds true, whether a particular phrase conveys what it should. 

As a child, I read because I loved stories. Later, I read because I believed that if I read enough stories, I would eventually understand people, the world, and maybe myself. While I now know it’s impossible to understand this impossible world, it also took me much longer than I expected to start a dialogue with myself. 

I am a person who built her life around language but spent most of that life without the words necessary to describe herself.

When people talk about education, they usually mean school, and school does matter a lot. It shapes us in many ways. But we are educated all the time. We learn who we are from our families, from books, from television, from jokes, from the questions people ask us and the answers they expect us to give. We learn by looking at other people and trying to find ourselves in them.

I also learned from books. Or at least I tried to. I always read compulsively. I didn’t really expect to find someone exactly like me, but I hoped to recognize something of myself somewhere. Instead, almost every story seemed to teach the same lesson: that love was universal, that desire was inevitable, that partnership was what gave a life its shape. I didn't realize then that these books were educating me, too.

As a child and teenager growing up in Poland in the late 1990s and 2000s, I was learning all the time. I learned that romantic love is the only one to be pursued; that adulthood means finding a partner and building your life around them. I learned that women feel like women, even if I was never entirely sure what that was supposed to mean. I learned that if something that seemed natural and universal to everyone else felt confusing or absent to me, then the problem was probably me.

What I didn’t learn was that there were other possibilities.

Of course, the words exist. Aseksualny. Aromantyczny. But then, they were almost impossible to come across. They didn’t exist in my everyday life, in school, in the media I consumed, in the books I read, or in conversations around me. If people talked about asexuality at all, it was usually as a symptom, a disorder, or a problem to be solved. Aromanticism might as well not have existed.

To be fair, awareness was and still is low everywhere. Aromantic and asexual people are marginalized regardless of language or country. Even today, finding information often means digging through niche websites, academic articles, forum posts, and community resources. It also means that, usually, you need to know where to start. To have a word or a kind of doubt to explore.

But when I was growing up, I didn’t even know where to start digging. When there is no language available to describe your experience, you don’t simply remain undefined. You define yourself using whatever categories are available.

I did not think, "Maybe I am aromantic." I thought, "Maybe I am emotionally immature."

I did not think, "Maybe I am asexual." I thought, "Maybe I am a late bloomer."

I did not think, "Maybe there are other ways to experience gender." I thought, "Maybe I am just bad at being a woman."

That last one still feels unresolved.

I don’t know if I don’t feel like a woman. I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that I have never felt particularly close to what the world understands a woman to be. I spent years assuming that this distance was a personal failure rather than a meaningful experience in itself. Maybe I am a woman. Maybe I am something adjacent to a woman. Maybe the distinction matters less than the fact that I never felt fully at home in the role I was given.

I think this is one of the difficulties of having an identity that remains relatively unknown and poorly understood. Even if words exist, finding them can take years. And before you find them, you still have to explain yourself somehow.

And so I improvised – I created theories, treated personality traits as symptoms and symptoms as personality traits; I became very good at performing normality. I was especially good at that because I was also learning other things about myself, too late. I am neurodivergent. I have struggled with mental illness for much of my life, but I went undiagnosed. For years, these experiences explained everything and nothing at the same time. They became the framework through which I understood all my other differences.

Why don't I fall in love? Probably anxiety.

Why don't I want sex? Probably depression and body dysmorphia.

Why do I feel disconnected from expectations of femininity? Probably low self-esteem and the sense that I had always failed at being the kind of person everyone else seemed to be.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to explain yourself using a vocabulary that was not built for you.

Eventually, I found words. Mostly, I found them in English. This is not because English-speaking countries are enlightened utopias for aromantic and asexual people. They most definitely are not. But English-language communities, resources, essays, academic texts, and personal stories were easier to find once I knew what I was looking for.

That is the important part: once I knew what I was looking for. The internet is full of information. But first, you need the search terms.

I sometimes think about how much of my life was shaped by not having them. Discovering myself in my late twenties wasn’t a tragedy per se. There always is something beautiful about realizing that there are people like you, that you are not alone, that there are words for experiences you thought were unspeakable. And, indeed, it is never too late.

But I have become skeptical of the way we use the phrase "never too late."

It’s never too late to understand yourself, but it doesn’t mean there is no cost to understanding yourself late. There are years I spent trying to become a person I was never going to become; books I read looking for reflections of myself and finding none; conversations I had using words that never quite fit; questions I asked about myself that I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know there were different questions to ask.

I still believe that words matter. In fact, I think I believe it more strongly now than I did before, because I know what happens when the words you need are unavailable, hidden, untranslated, or treated as impossible. You don’t become wordless – you become fluent in misunderstandings.

And perhaps that is the most important thing I learned, although I learned it too late: understanding yourself is a form of education. And sometimes the hardest part is not finding the answer but discovering that nobody ever taught you the right questions.