At the beginning of the year, I was a motivational speaker (in a sense) for telling people to be themselves. I told people not to care what other people think, and to do what makes them happy. It was extremely ironic, seeing that I had been changing myself to be “cool.” I was always trying to dress cool. I was always trying to talk cool. I came to hate the way cool people talked, and still do. I probably cared about the opinions of other people the most. I wasn’t scared to be myself, I was scared of reactions and as a result wasn’t myself. I just wanted acceptance by the cool kids. In a way, I got that. I was sort of in the neutral zone, talking to everybody but not really being in the group. I was like a boar in the midst of pigs. Not really noticed, but there. Different.


I was never really outspoken about myself. People just assumed and noticed that I’m either really mean or really nice. I stayed quiet about girls. The only real time I talked about girls was when I’d have a girlfriend. They randomly popped in and out of my life. From October to November, I had a girlfriend. I wouldn’t actually call her a girlfriend, but this is what most people would call it. We were both quiet, not ever really saying much. We didn’t talk much for the same reasons. She was nervous, I was nervous. I wasn't sure about myself, she wasn't sure about herself. We weren’t going to last and I sort of think we both knew that. A month was all it took for us to finally fully realize we weren’t meant for each other. So we broke up. I was silent from then on about relationships.

People would then start asking things. Some I remember most are: “Why were you so shy?” and: “If you don’t care about her, then why talk about her?” and my favorite: “Are you gay?” To the first I would reply, “It wasn’t me, it was her.” To the second I would reply, “Because I still care.” To the third I would say, “No I’m not gay.” And I’m not. As I previously said, I was silent about my life outside of school unless asked about my weekend. My closest friends were the only ones that I kept informed about anything. I tried many ways of saying it. I would write it in my Instagram bio and feel accomplished afterwards. Or just use the dumb emoji that portrayed two couples. One was a man and a woman, the other was a man and a man. I would smile and say, “Ok so that was easy.” Then I thought about how hidden that was. Nobody paid attention much to my page. Nobody does, really, unless they’re actually interested in your page.
March 15th proved to be a day I would remember, though. I thought about it. I sat for a good 45 minutes simply formulating my words. I ate pizza in deep thought. I wrote down my ideas of the topic. Then I just posted it. I entitled it "Coming Out of the Halfway Closet." It was only called that in my mind, though, because it seemed more cheesy than the actual post. I didn't really know what it was. I barely thought I had the right to write such a thing. Supposedly I was too young to know these things, and could only speculate. I wanted to write more to be perfectly honest, but I didn’t. My plan was just to get the message across and hope for the best. All of a sudden, I became talked about. In the halls at school, I was getting high fives. More people were talking to me. I’d say I gained a large population of the middle school as friends. If they didn’t hear it from the post, they heard it from their friends. No bad things were said. The only negative to it was the amount of girls that wanted to go to the mall with me. This irked me for obvious reasons. I was accepted. I actually felt accepted, though. Not the fake acceptance I came to know at the beginning of the year. Now, when people have conversations with me, I feel genuinely real. Real. And now, I don’t have to actually tell people anything because they know that I’m being real with myself.