For 15 and a half years, I lived in a cage. My soul was trapped inside of a prison built by myself and encouraged by the faith of my parents. My spirit was crushed by the pressure of the culture around me, suppressed by who I was told I needed to be. This is probably the reason I’m so claustrophobic, I’d been confined inside all the bullshit for so long my soul can no longer handle small spaces, I can’t deal with the idea of no escape. From birth I was told who I was to be, who I was to love, and it was so drastically different from the true nature of my soul all I could do was try to contain how I truly felt, who I really am inside. I forced myself to turn off every single thing that I felt, because I was told that what I felt was wrong. Obviously I couldn’t be myself when myself was pure evil. I am the spawn of Satan, I’m damned to deal with eternal pain and suffering in some fiery underworld because of the way that I feel. I was so convinced this would be my fate for so long, I felt as if my only choice was to suppress myself, to put on a mask of the good little Mormon boy they wanted me to be, hiding my true face.

Now, I am free. I broke the cage, I am free of the unjust incarceration that bound me for so long. I am finally myself, finally who I want to be. Though I am still having attempts made by those around me who want to bind me to a strict social law of a belief I don’t even share, I will break free of it all. I will be true, no matter what they say, no matter what they do.

I feel like a true introduction is in order, rather than the ranting I began with. I’m 16 years old. I’m pansexual, I am a Buddhist, and I am myself. And in case you’re wondering I’m a guy. That’s not all there is to me obviously, as no human being can be simplified down to three or four words, I believe our souls to be so complex and individual that we have thousands of defining characteristics that we wouldn’t be ourselves without, but this is supposed to be a short story and I already tend to go on, so I’ll apply the K.I.S.S method and Keep It Simple (Stupid). I have worked hard to become who I am today, a person much closer to the true nature of my soul, and I am very proud of that work. I have two passions: Love, and Music. These are the things that drive me, the things that control all my aspirations and ambitions. I try to base my life, my morals, my every action on helping people, and on true happiness?the ultimate goal of life. This is how I live my life, how I have chosen to make myself who I want to be.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve dealt with a lot of suppression, in some cases I would go so far as to call it oppression, throughout my life. As much as I hate to say it, much of this has come from my parents, in particular their religion. Both my parents were raised Mormons, of the LDS faith, and decided that because it seemed to bring them happiness that they would do the same for their kids. When you’re young, you accept what your parents say. They are your creators, your gods in a way?they know everything. What they say is fact, and everyone else is wrong. My parents couldn’t hide the world from me, however. As soon as they ship you off to school at five years old, they risk you exposing the truth, the truth being that they are only humans, as naive and simple minded as anyone, and they don’t know the truth. No one does, because if anyone did everyone would. When you’re thrust into the world, you immediately begin to see this. You hear people using words you were told never to use, words you’d never even heard before, as if it’s nothing. You see people doing things you were told is evil, but to the people doing it, it’s normal everyday life. You begin to realize that not everyone believes the way you do, not everyone sees the world the way you do. Then you begin to question: Why do they believe differently? Is it possible that I believe wrong. I believe this to be an intensely important moment, if we don’t question, how will we ever know? How will we ever believe anything?

I was raised in a household with a mom and a dad, as most children are. Boys like girls, that’s just how it worked. But when I started to go to school, I saw very quickly that I liked boys and girls just the same. They were all people to me, all on the same field. Because of how I was raised, however, I decided to keep this feeling secret. So I buried it at a very young age. My dad talked a lot about how he was when he was a kid, about how he had a crush on every girl and dated them all from a very young age. Because of what fathers are to us children, I thought this was how I was supposed to be. It wasn’t who I was, but it was a sort of goal. So I forced for so long until it became who I was. I spent so many years trying to be some specific person that it became my reality, but it was never who I truly was. I held the mask to my face for so long that the two fused, becoming almost one. And it hurt, it always hurt.

Second grade is when I first heard the word “Gay”. I was a hugger as a child. I hugged everyone, no matter what. One day I went to hug my friend, a boy named Elijah. My arms outstretched, I walked towards him expecting his arms wrapped around me in warm embrace. What I got instead I remember to this day. He pushed me away. “What are you, gay?” He yelled at me angrily, then turned around and stomped his feet, leaving me on the ground, crying. It seems like I cried for the rest of the day until I went home to my mother. When asked why I was crying, I simply looked up at her. I wiped my tears, and took a breath. “What does gay mean?” I asked her. She didn’t answer. I simply remember her sighing, and hugging me. So I did what any kid would do. I asked around at school. When someone finally told me, I was infinitely confused. Part of me thought: Ok, what’s wrong with that? The other part of me, the Mormon part, quickly turned that thought off. Boys only like girls, I thought, that’s the way it is and that’s the way it has to be.

Fifth grade is when I was first called a faggot. Me and my friend Aidan always sat together on the bus. We were close, and sat close together every day. The kid sitting in front of us looked at us every day. “You guys are such faggots.” He would say to us. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew I didn’t like it. When I finally found out, I had a similar reaction to in second grade. I stopped sitting so close to Aidan, and I announced to the class that I had a crush on the girl who sat next to me in class. Throughout these years of elementary school I heard these words used to describe me again and again, and in cases that made no sense to my young mind. Why did people call me gay when I cried, or when I hung out with girls, or when I got hurt. I hate violence, I always have, and that earned me much of the same treatment. Because I’m a boy I’m supposed to love violence, and because I don’t, that’s why I’m gay, or so the world told me.

Sixth grade was hell. My school was the most Ghetto place I have been to this day. I received much of the same treatment I did in my earlier years, only amplified. People had learned new words, new ways to attack me because I was different. Because I wasn’t like boys were supposed to be. One lunch a boy sat across from me, and for the entirety of lunch he attacked me brutally. Calling me a fag, a useless waste of space, a gay loser with no friends, a girl. This last one, using girl as an insult pisses me off more than anything. Not because it insults my masculinity or something, but because it inherently says that half of the population is weaker than the other, and that certain characteristics are necessary for either gender, an idea I detest.

Seventh grade was much the same, even though I transferred schools. I did, however, have a best friend. His name was Jake, and I had never been so comfortable with anyone before. We would cuddle, we would hug, we would sleep in the same bed. Each time something like this happened, however, he would remind me: “No homo”. I heard this phrase a lot, and came to think it was ok, that it was true even for me. He claimed to be accepting of all sexualities, but I knew better. I was still trying to convince myself I was straight, and doing a fairly good job of it, because if I wasn’t, who knew what would happen to my best friend.

Just before eighth grade we moved to Scotland, one of the biggest changes I’ve ever had to go through. I had to get used to a new culture, a new world really. My dad told me it was a chance to restart, a chance to be the person I wanted to be. No one there knew me so I could be anyone and they wouldn’t know how fake it would be. So of course I decided to be even more fake, move even further away from who I really was, who I really wanted to be. I became more of an asshole, more of a player, more of some stupid all-american wannabe gangster. The worst part of it all is that people liked it. They encouraged it. They were so amused by this character I created that I couldn’t help but accentuate it. It became who I was in every way, but it wasn’t me in any way. This is when I started smoking weed as well, I found it as a beautiful form of escapism from the deep, dark depression I constantly felt.

Living in Scotland, I was in a different school system, one that would not line up when we moved back to the United states in a few years as we planned. So I tried online school, a terrible idea for someone as intensely ADHD as I. So I failed every class except one that semester. My family decided it best to move right away at that point, so in February 2015, I moved to Utah state. If you don’t know Utah very well, it’s the Mormon state really, the town I live in has something close to a 90% Mormon population. Not a fun place for me. I was still able to get my weed fix, it’s never too difficult. Again, moving was a chance to reinvent myself, to be true to myself. Again, I wasted it. I continued the whole act. In May I was busted. I was caught at school with my pipe and a lighter, as well as the fact that I had tagged the school the night before. That was a major turning point in my life. I kinda realized how much I had “F-ed” up, how wrong my life was. In the following three or four months I broke free of the cage I had been living in my whole life until that point. I met my best friend, the single most important person in helping me to be happy with myself, and I can never repay him for that. Everyone needs a friend like him, someone that will care when everyone else doesn’t, someone that will accept every little quirk and flaw, no matter what. Hell, I was even able to come out to my parents, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I dress the way I want, I talk the way I want, I believe the way I want. I am finally, truly, happily me.