Okay so this won’t be the smoothest written blog here but this is my story so far of how my life started to change completely.

It all started in seventh grade for me. I’d been raised knowing religion and with a rather strict family. I’d never dated and for some reason everyone seemed to be dating at the time. Well except me…And because of that I stuck out like a sore thumb to a lot of people.

Then one day a friend of mine asked me why I wasn’t dating and I said simply no one was interested in me. Then he accused me of something that at the time was majorly offensive to me. He called me a lesbian and being raised the way I was I got very angry and was disgusted at the  accusation. I mean how dare he say that I was something so vile and wrong?

There was another reason I was angry though. I was angry with myself because in the back of my mind I wondered was it so wrong to like girls? Was it so wrong to find them… Attractive?

I didn’t realize it at the time, mainly due to the fact that I never wanted to, but I did view girls differently than your average straight girl would. I found them fascinating and beautiful. I didn’t look at girls and envy their beauty but rather… Enjoyed it I guess. I convinced myself that that was normal though and all girls did it.

I ignored these thoughts for the rest of the year until eighth grade came along. That was the year I had my first boyfriend. He was great but I found it confusing and there was so much pressure from my family to do this or that. Eventually I had to break up with him but to this day no one knows it was me who ended it. There was so much pressure to stay with him that I had to make it look like he left me. I didn’t realize this then but my families actions made me even more unsure of whether I truly liked boys.

That year became an even lower point for me when I became depressed. I found out some awful things about my father, I was trying my best not to question my sexuality and I had so much pressure in school to be a perfect student. Plus my mother constantly reminded me that I was a mess up for having my first boyfriend leave me. I was suicidal for several months and severely depressed. Emotionally I felt empty and every smile and laugh was false.

I snapped towards the end of the year and knew that when I went home that day I was going to kill myself. At last minute before I left the school though I told a counselor what I was going to do. There was a small part of me that knew if I got some help I could make it through this. I got locked up for a bit to be evaluated and in a way it saved me and helped to clear my head. It also made things worse.