I was around eight or seven when I first heard the word “dyke,” My mom said it. I don’t remember why she said it but I do remember being curious about it, I never heard that word before and when I asked her about it she just changed the subject but that didn’t stop me. Later I grabbed a dictionary and looked it up and that led to me learning a lot of different things. I had a limited understanding of the information that was presented to me since I was so young, but I remember my take away being this, “What was the big deal?” I went to a private Lutheran school through elementary and was taught that love was love, much later I would realize that they were only talking about love between a man and a women. My early learning experiences with …show more content…
After that I finally understood what my friends were talking about but instead of boys it was girls and that scared the hell out of me. Ages thirteen through sixteen were tough, I was angry, confused, scared and at times even hated myself. My family and friends noticed the change but I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t even understand what was happening with me. I was always a huge bookworm and reading was my escape, one day I was in the city library and stumbled across Annie on My Mind.
Reading that helped me accept who I am and made me hungry for more stories like that, and though I didn’t find a lot of published work I did find fanfiction online. Read stories where the characters were going through my situation and feeling what I was feeling just really helped me, after accepting who I was I was happy and even though I was scared to talk to my friends and family about it all those negative thought and feelings weren’t the focus of my life anymore. I knew the next step was to come out and that didn’t happen till my freshman year of