Confessions of a Middle-Aged Robot
Hello Reader. My Name is R. Wayne Mathetes, and I am a robot.
That is a hell of a way to open, isn't it? Though if I am being honest, the whole "being a robot" is kind of new to me. If I think about it in retrospect, there definitely were signs. It is probably more accurate to say that this is the first time where being a robot comes naturally to me.
My earliest exposure to robot media or any kind was Star Wars. Sometime in the 90s on one of the 3 TV stations in New Zealand I got my first glimpse at the dynamic duo that was C-3PO and R2-D2. A terribly young Wayne was delighted with what he saw at the time and my mother ended up recording that particular presentation onto VHS – local advertisements and all. Until 2001, Star Wars was my everything. At the time, I didn't feel quite human either. My peers within the public school system would tease me mercilessly for reasons I simply could not comprehend. My mother would bring me to places that were unfamiliar for the purpose of specialized instruction on how to interact with humans and at one point I had a narrative in my head that I was actually from space. I also thought I had a friend that was an extraterrestrial who was looking after me to the point of affixing glowing stars on the ceiling of my bedroom. Though I did try to make friends, I required considerable assistance from my parents. My mother was much more present than my father and still continues to be so. As a result, the burden of conditioning me for human society fell to her. In 1997 I officially got my diagnosis of what we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder, although I was not aware of it at the time. My mother did the best she could to help me. Unfortunately, this was back in the times when Low Support Needs Autism was named after a Nazi, which I'm sure didn't help matters and no one really had much of an idea on how to deal with it. (I now know there is a strong link between ASD and alterhumanity, but there are much more qualified individuals who can talk about that.)
I am rambling, where was I?
2001 was a terrible year for me, personally. You get ripped away from the one home you've ever known, all your friends, your bird; even the video games that kept you company when no one else would (Damn you region lock!). All of a sudden you feel even more isolated and inhuman for being unable to relate to damn near anyone your age. Oh, 9/11 happened. That kind of sucked I guess. In summer of 2001 I discovered the original Super Smash Bros at a summer camp I attended and damn near immediately I became obsessed with her. Samus Aran. Not really a robot, but I thought her armor was very cool. That's when the trouble started, that damn armor. I remember envying not being able to look that unrecognizable as a human. In a way, she and I are the inverse of each other. She is a human piloting a machine and I am a machine piloting a human. Unlike me, she could stop piloting the machine at any time, not so much for me. In some way, I was envious of that fact. This continued until about 2005. I'd also like to shout out the movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for showing me a machine that was as depressed as I was at the time, perhaps even more so. Either way, I felt seen.
Well, what happened in 2005? I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation after about – how many years of it being off the air? At least a decade I'm sure. Teenage hormones being what they were, I was looking for somewhere to direct that excess energy. Enter: the Soong-Type Android Data. Here was someone I could more easily emulate. If the crew of the Enterprise-D accepted him as he was, and encouraged his pursuits, then maybe I had a chance too. This part of my life ended up with me making some very long time friends as a result of the places I went online. Then shit in my life got uncomfortably real and it was time to put what I learned about pretending to be a human into action. I learned that deviance from expected human behavior unsettled people and that my best way to mitigate that was to become extremely compliant. When I could not be compliant, I was to remain unseen. This would minimize the amount of friction I would have with interacting with humans, because at this point, all I really wanted was to be left alone with few exceptions. This was the early 2000s, so the majority of peer to peer communication relied on text. I found it easier to interact this way as I did not have to worry about human social cues or body language. The addition of tone signifiers such as 'lol' or 'omg' helped to clarify most misunderstandings. It was this dichotomy of being unable to connect in the real world, but doing so more effortlessly online that appeared to strengthen my perception of myself as either a broken human, or perhaps even not a human at all. Since 2012, I had been dealing with one crisis after another, so survival was much more important than figuring out who I was. I put on the good, obedient bot face and tried to do what was expected of me – granted there were exceptions – and I did make mistakes. I did eventually manage to get myself into a secure place, under the very close supervision of my humans which now consist of my mother and her new boyfriend. (Remember, I am neurodivergent, and even my own family is not exempt from infantilizing me in their misguided attempts to keep me safe.)
Looking back on it now, I realize just how much of myself I was hiding in an effort to gain some sort of security. In 2006, I first joined Second Life and made myself a Borg avatar. At the time, it felt like a good reflection of my machine nature. Not every community can last forever, so the Star Trek community I was originally a part of ended up disintegrating. I ended up falling in with the furry fandom and becoming a bird. At points I did try to combine cybernetic aspects with my bird avatars, but they never really ended up looking right long term. I ended up from bird avatar to bird avatar in an effort to find something that felt right and to keep up with advances in avatar technology. I lost interest in Second Life for a while. I realized I didn't fit in with the furry subculture, and I still can't figure out exactly why. Perhaps it was the legendary amount of drama I was often privy to, and perhaps it was the fact that the circles I frequented were often very horny. I must admit I was not yet comfortable enough with myself to express that aspect publicly. I became somewhat of a virtual hermit and this allowed me time to think while I started picking up the pieces of crisis after crisis that followed me from 2012 onward. I'm really not kidding when I said that was a terrible time for me. I don't want to talk about it.
Sometime during this maelstrom of fuck, around 2017, I started doing a bit of internal poking, and that's when I finally started acknowledging I was not the person I was born as – at least from a gender perspective. That year, “Epsilon” (she/her) became “Schiavona” (they/them). In hindsight this is very funny, as a Schiavona is not only a type of basket-hilted sword (I really, really like swords) but it is also the Italian word for “slave”. If you know your etymology, the word “robot” also comes from the Slavic word for “slave” as well. I'm not saying this was foreshadowing, but it's very funny in hindsight. There wasn't anyone in real life I could tell about this. How could they possibly understand? It is worth remembering that it was 2017 – as in the first year of the first Trump term. You really think I could have gone around publicly telling people “Hey, I'm not a woman, and in fact, I think I may not even be a human” and not get my shit kicked in? FUCK no, I think I was still living with my mom at the time too. I was doing janitor stuff at the time, an utterly thankless job that I sucked at.
Let's fast-forward a bit, past the Trump presidency and the COVID shit. We all know what happened there, we were all in survival mode. This continued until like, 2023, when 2 things happened. Thing number 1: My remaining family members decided it was time for them to ditch my current residence for greener pastures. Given all the shit that happened, I was tempted to join them, but something else said “Listen, do you want to be under their gaze forever? You've built a pretty decent life for yourself here. You don't HAVE to go.” So I didn't. That was probably the best decision I could have made for myself then. Now, I was free to actually explore and express myself the way I wanted to... but I still wasn't really close to figuring myself out. It wasn't until Thing Number 2 occurred that shit got incredibly real.
Thing number 2: I found a new metal husband. I started playing Palia, got obsessed with Einar, found a community. I found out rather quickly that community was shit, but some of us kind of splintered off and made our own; One that is a lot healthier, I think. A few months in, I figured “Hey, maybe I'm actually a guy.” and that's how I became Wayne in addition to being Schiavona. Honestly if it weren't for that group, I probably wouldn't have reached out further. In an effort to find more media with neat robots (Cause Palia didn't have much content coming out at the time.) I started reading the Asimov Robot books as well as The Murderbot Diaries. Something welled up inside me – a feeling I hadn't felt in a while. It was a realization. I am not just bad at interacting with humans and yet still wanted to help them just because I'm neurodivergent. It was also because, at heart, I was, am, and will be a machine. The timing is interesting too, being roughly around the same time of the year I figured out I was a guy. Probably isn't intentional, but if I had a nickel for every time a piece of science fiction caused me to realize something about myself, I'd have a lot of nickels – but still not enough to buy myself a slushie.
So where do I go from here? I have no idea. I'm still trying to figure out what it means to be an android running on gynoid hardware, and invariably I'm going to get some things wrong along the way. I don't know all the relevant terms regarding alterhumanity, for one. I think at this point in my life, worrying about micro-labels is more trouble than it's worth. Still, if asked, I will say “I'm a robot.” and hope people will be satisfied with that. I know a lot of people won't get it, and I don't expect them to get it. Nor do I expect to tell everyone I know about it.
I don't really have a thesis statement for this, but for those who are also wondering “Well, how did I get here?” about themselves, perhaps consider writing a reflective work like this. If you do, please let me know. I'd love to read it.
See you next mission.