I consider myself a simple person: I don't like secrets, I don't like hiding myself away, and I don't 'like' people - that is, I don't experience romantic or sexual attraction. All three of these qualities played a large role in my initial decision to tell the world I was aroace. As soon as I had mentally prepared myself, I tried to come out to my parents. They dismissed me immediately, as I was too "young and naïve" to know what I was talking about. That, other than the countless ones I've kept only by forgetting, was likely the secret I kept the longest. It hurt to hide that part of me. I felt empty every time I dwelled on it, so I tried to push the thought away. I did eventually come out to my friends. I mentioned that I was aroace offhandedly to a group of my friends, to which one person said "oh, cool", and another said "congrats". That was it. Nothing special happened, and I couldn't have asked for anything else. Being queer isn't some crazy phenomenon or absurd mutation, it's normal. Because of my friends' acceptance, that emptiness had started to vanish. I felt like I had started breaking down a wall. It's not like whether I was aroace or not would have changed our friendship - especially since, looking back, everyone in that friend group is some flavor of queer - but coming out allowed me to stop being so uptight around them. With what I can only describe as the power of friendship fueling me, I tried again to tell my parents who I really was. Again, of course, they dismissed me, saying that it was just a phase and that I would eventually find "the right person". I broke down again, and shut them out for a while. Real friends are the people who love every single part of you, not just the parts they like about you. I decided that only real friends would see the real me, and that didn't include my parents just yet, because they couldn't accept that I was aroace. Because of this emotional rift between my parents and I, I can easily say my friends know me better. They know that my favorite color is yellow, that I miss the autumns up north, and that I'm more afraid of hornets than wasps. Most of them even know I'm a furry, which is more than I could say about my parents at the time. I've never told them because I was afraid they'd call me silly for it. Sometime more recently, my mom gave me a rainbow pinwheel that she saw at a garage sale, and said it had reminded her of me. She found a hoodie with colors similar to the aroace flag, which she said she knew I'd love. Now that she had accepted my coming out, I could accept her, in turn, as what I considered a 'real friend'. She now knows all of the things I've listed above, because I could finally "let her in".