consciously choose my eyeliner and septum piercing and long hair as a disguise, but in retrospect that is exactly what they were. I knew I could not pass as straight, but I thought perhaps I could pass as “just weird.” No, I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself.
