Sexual Identity In High School

Throughout my years as an underclassmen in high school, I struggled with my sexual identity, but always somehow managed to ignore it. During the beginning of my junior year, I realized I cannot continue to ignore something that has such a large presence in my life. Sexual orientation plays such a large role in somebody’s life as it depicts what kind of person you will spend the rest of your life with and where you go with them. During my eighth grade year, my teacher had asked all of my grade to write letters to ourselves and that we would receive these letters during the beginning of senior year. As I started senior year, I had received a letter in the mail from my eighth grade teacher. As I opened it, I eagerly read through it before stumbling …show more content…
While reading this letter, I had questioned if I had convinced myself that I was somebody that I was not. During my junior year, I had finally come to terms with who I truly was, and that I felt comfortable walking into school being the first openly gay male at a private, Catholic school. While I was freshly “out of the closet”, I reached out to one of my mutual friends, Ryan. Ryan was one of the only openly gay males I had known, and I wanted to get more involved in the LGBTQ+ community and the fight for equality. Through common interests, I had become such close friends with Ryan, to the point of him being comfortable enough to share personal details about himself with me. During our weekly, therapeutic conversations in his car at the end of a cul de sac, he explained to me that his parents had no intention to support him through college, unlike his heterosexual brother. He explained to me that his parents had abused him mentally and physically to the extent of attempting suicide multiple times. Reflecting on this conversation brings me to tears of sadness, thinking about the number of teenagers that struggle to be accepted with who they truly