From Big Red Book to Bright Blue Screen - Who Am I? (Part 1)

So I was a very inquisitive child. I wanted to know how everything worked. My parents, both incredibly smart in their own right, but also incredibly busy and not always readily available, soon answered every question the same: Look it up. Now this was before the internet was a thing so I looked everything up in this big red dictionary with a nice hard cover and glossy gilded pages and little indents on the side for each letter, the perfect size for my little fingers. Fast forward a few years and I’m like 10 or 11.

The internet is now a thing, and the answers to all of my questions have moved from the big red book to the computer screen which used to be just for educational video games. Now it’s extremely educational in a whole new way. I’m a preteen, starting puberty pretty early for a boy, loaded with questions, and I’m already programmed to skip people and go straight to the text. And that was the closest thing I ever had to “the talk.” This is also how I figured out I was gay. It started with me innocently looking up information on my changing body, and then I was like whoa I like what I’m seeing and how it’s making me feel.

I was already slightly struggling with my gender identity since I had more in common with girls than boys and some other issues that I'll discuss later. So I’m not even in middle school yet and I was already significantly different than everyone I could ever know in my airtight conservative Christian life bubble. So just barely starting the second decade of life and I started to question if I wanted to continue.