How I Accidentally Came Out to Half my Team

Hey! My name is Sara and I’ve been an admin here for a few months and I’m a senior as part of FIM. On my team I’m in charge of business and media department, I also work on my team’s website. I have been with FIRST for 4 years, but I competed with Vex in middle school. I am asexual but pretty into girls romantically.  In my free time I like to play/listen to music (Alt-J is great) and do art. I’m a photographer and digital artist so if you have art questions feel free to ask!

Now, you might be thinking how one might accidentally come out  to half their team. Well, let me give you a bit of a backstory. I belong to a team that has a pretty decent split between liberals and conservative (and that has my dad as a mentor) so for the most part I am (or was) in the closet. This was working great up until this year, I laid low and didn’t talk to anyone on my team about my sexuality.

This year, a few kids on my team decided it would be fun to start shipping people. Everyone that was involved knew about it and was totally fine with it. It was going good until they started talking about shipping me with another person in the business group. For a while it was fine and we joked about it and blew it off.

This went on for a while, then all of a sudden the mentors got a hold of this information. They didn’t really care, until my dad found out. My dad got really mad at this and so I figured I needed to do something. I text the person who I was being shipped with and the group of people that were doing the shipping explaining to them how I got in trouble and how I’m asexual and that the ship I’m in needs to be killed. Well, they understood, but it meant that I just came out as something that a lot of people don’t understand. In the end this never got back to my dad (and still hasn’t), but I had to come out to half my team.

With all this happening a month ago, things tend to still be a bit awkward when they think of a good person to ship me with, then remember what could happen and why it wouldn’t make sense to ship me with said person. I don’t regret doing what I did, although sometimes I wish I had did it at a better time and was able to fully explain everything.

-Sara