I knew from a very young age that my mind worked in odd ways compared to my peers. My consciousness of my difference growing up allowed me to be hyper aware of how to act like others. I was actively doing anything to conceal myself from everybody. Yet I couldn’t hide it from myself. It was like a large gay elephant in my small, confining bedroom. It had become maddening. At one point, I even came out to my somewhat progressive mother as pansexual, and she believed that thirteen was too young to know if I desired anybody at all. I was accepted of course, but not supported, and I firmly believe that’s when my queer-four-year-long hibernation began. I focused on school, and I found a strong passion for pop culture, media, and journalism. However, after my very premature “coming out”, I was banned from all social media, as my mother and her now ex-husband believed that is what “made me gay”. I no longer had an outlet for my personality. I didn’t have any friends. I was alone in a battle I wasn’t prepared to fight. My small school has only about eight hundred kids, and no one was really gay. In fact, my sophomore year of high school, a kid on the football team, for the sake of anonymity I'll call him John, came out. He was beaten so badly, he was hospitalized for three days. There aren’t any reports on this case at all, as John was so horrified for his safety, he transferred schools and no one ever heard from him again. But even when we were in middle school, the homophobia was so prominent that it went unpunished. Slurs were joked around, food thrown at kids that would be brave enough to be themselves, and all this did was push me to fear. So, around eighth grade, I began journaling. It started with a small notebook, my handwriting had always been sloppy, and that did not change. I wrote about my days at school, my mom’s ex-husband and his alcoholism, and I wrote about what was so wrong with me. It’s crazy to think now that the young version of myself believed we were wrong. The notebook turned into writing full short stories, and I found my true love, writing fiction. I finally got my internet access granted when I was sixteen, and self-published a lot of short stories on different websites, gaining a little bit of a following along the way. Finally, in freshman year, I had enough courage to come out as bisexual to one of my closest friends still to this day, Chandler, a gay man in my Spanish one class. That was the beginning of finding my true self. I came out to a few other friends and started publicly dating a girl my sophomore year. She is still one of my close friends to this day. I don’t tell everyone my identity, as it isn’t my entire personality, but it is a big part of me. It might only be a question if somebody brings it up, but I am proud of that part of myself. I will forever thank that purple spiral notebook, and the glitter gel pens I would use to try to work through my crazy mind. It’s hard to put into just 600 words how much writing has become an outlet for me over the years, and I am a strong believer I would be the same scared girl confined to my mind, instead of the flourishing young queer woman I am today.