The profound isolation, the suffocating confusion right alongside the painful awareness that Something Is Not Right Here.
For me, it lasted all through HS, till I went away to college.
Staggering out of that information vacuum was like gasping in my first breaths of air.
Or like shrugging out of a straightjacket, unsure of what it even means to move.
Desperate, desperate despair, where the numb days WERE the good days, however arrived at.
"Typical, difficult teenage years." That's a "lifestyle choice" I would have gladly embraced, in fact TRIED to, over and over again.
What a better world we live in today. Just the presence of a GSA can make an enormous difference, let alone Google and all the other information tools available now.
Jesus, just a book in the town library that said something other than Pervert, Freak, and Better Off Dead would have been something.
All the hard-fought progress we've made... it matters, it really does. Transforming young lives in ways that I, and many others, could not even contemplate at that time in our lives.
That's the part I try to dwell on now: It does get better, it HAS gotten better. More and more, for some, it never has to be so horribly Bad in the first place at all.
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