As a fellow autistic Star Trek fan, Data has always held a special place in my heart. His drive to be more human, his constant desire to understand the human experience resonated with me as a child and young adult who also struggled to be human in the way others demanded of me, to feel and display emotion and to fit in with the society in which I was immersed without standing out like a sore thumb. Data’s earnest attempts at understanding and communicating and fitting in with others, and the frequency with which people got upset or frustrated with him for not being like them reflected my own experiences trying to emulate the behavior of those around me but never quite getting it right.



It took me a long time of wrestling with the contradiction between Data’s obvious desires and feelings, and stated “lack of emotion” before I came to a satisfactory answer. Obviously, Data possesses emotions. What he does not seem to possess, however, is a good way of talking about his emotions, of naming and processing sensations and making sense of them. There’s so much within him that he doesn’t understand and can’t articulate; he can’t cross-reference and compare one feeling to another, give it a name and refer back to it. In other words, Data is deeply alexithymic. He doesn’t know how to connect his behaviours to what he feels inside, how to make the connection and understand the relationship between one and the other.



As someone who, in the midst of a deeply distressing and unsafe childhood, could only muster up “calm” or “okay” or “i don’t know” in response to any inquiry about my emotional state, who understood emself in terms only of “angry” and “not angry”, my favorite android’s quest to comprehend his own mind and heart (his oh-so-very-big and beautiful heart, my sweetest of mechanical darlings) and make sense of himself was desperately necessary. And seeing that he had friends, companions, loved ones and meaningful relationships with people who desired his company and included him in their community without condition, was also necessary.



I love Data.