“How do I know who I want to marry?” I asked my mom, as curious children often do.

“You want to marry someone who is your best friend,” she replied, and as curious children often do, I accepted this as the truth.

“Then I’m gonna marry Dana! She’s my best friend!”

My mother simply smiled.

I was very lucky to grow up in the environment I did, never told that there was only one way to live, love, or be. I was exposed to all kinds of people as I grew up. My family raised me with an open mind and heart.

However, once I entered middle school, I quickly realized that many kids were not raised like I was. I heard new words used in insulting ways. Fag. Homo. Gay. I knew the kids were just bullies, but their words and beliefs soaked into my skin and burrowed into my mind.

In seventh grade, I came out as genderfluid to my friends and family. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. It was a twisted, unfulfilling label for me, but I felt like I had no other choice. Better to be a boy who liked girls than a girl who did, right? Apparently not. I lost friends and relationships with my family. I felt humiliated, ashamed. I buried it away, pushed it down until all I saw was black, white, and gray. No colors, no pride. I was a girl who liked boys. I had to be. And God, did I try. I can’t count the number of boys I “dated” or “had a crush on”. I started to be like those girls that I said I never would be: boy-crazed and obsessed.

After I broke things off with my most recent ex-boyfriend, I felt more lost than ever. I had realized that maybe this wasn’t the way it had to be. I knew I never felt any of those feelings around boys that the books I had read and the movies I had watched talked about. And I wouldn’t let myself think for even a second about what I would feel around a girl. Maybe I just didn’t like anyone at all; maybe I didn’t have to. I must be asexual! That’s why I felt like throwing up when I thought about kissing a boy. That’s why all I saw were shades of black and white. I didn’t need color. For a long time, I felt like love wasn’t an option for me.

I was a sophomore in high school now. I was sure that this was the way I was meant to be, even if there may have been a girl on the high school’s soccer team who made my stomach hurt and head light. I didn’t like anyone, and I certainly didn’t like girls. The thoughts in my head were too confusing to understand and I had no one to talk to. Thankfully, I soon met my new therapist, a vast improvement from the first. We mainly focused on working through my anxiety disorder, but as I grew to trust her, every time we met, I wanted more and more to get that feeling off my chest. To say those words that I’d bottled up for years. To put on those rose-colored glasses and see the world’s colors.

“I think I like girls,” I admitted to her, on some random Thursday night in the middle of September. No one else knew, but in that small, brick room on the third floor of the counseling center, I was finally free.

Approximately one month and a half later, I asked that girl on the soccer team to be my girlfriend. I now see the world as a kaleidoscope of colors.

I’m queer. I’m proud. My love is not wrong. And like my mother would have me say now, “I’m going to marry whoever the hell I want.”

© Amelia. All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.