With each year that passes I feel like I get better at letting go of the guilt I’ve always felt of not being what everyone else wanted me to be, realizing that in essence it is actually my best asset. My mother once told me that the hardest thing to do in life is to try to be yourself, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve worked hard to try and claim my individuality and search for a place where it would be appreciated and where my opinions would be understood by like-minded souls.

The first paper I ever remember writing was in 5^th grade. We were asked by our teacher to pick a moment in time that changed the course of history and write an oral report to be presented later that week in front of our entire class. Being Texas, most kids picked the birth of Christ, Christopher Columbus “discovering” places, the American Revolution or something equally as one sided. I instead chose to write about the Black Plague. Needless to say, I was silenced before I even got past the rather graphic description of symptoms our medieval ancestors endured. Enraged, I asked my teacher after class why she had stopped me to which she replied “The Black Plague isn’t necessarily something that positively changed the world.” I had no problem telling her “That wasn’t what you asked for, you asked us for an event that simply changed the world and a 1/3 of Europe dying kind of changes things in my book, besides, Christopher Columbus giving natives syphilis positively changed the world?” I was sent to see the principal. I will be the first to admit I have always had a dark sense of humor, and growing up in small town Texas I can tell you there is nothing those people dislike more than a morbid, funny, little gay kid. I was a familiar face in the principal’s office for consistently correcting the various teachers’ mistakes including a spelling test error in which I was docked a few points for spelling colour instead of color. My mother being English and a graduate of Cambridge, I marched home in a bitter fashion and showed her the spelling test. A few moments later a call was made and the teacher was informed of the fact that the spelling test was covering words from the English language and that I was well versed in my own language and its correct spelling in its country of origin. I eventually took an academic assessment test that year and discovered I read at a college graduate level in 5^th grade.

The people teaching me didn’t even go to college little less read books and my fellow students were just as bad. The only intelligent conversation I had it my day was coming home to a cup of tea and biscuits with my mom. My happiest moments were rifling through her extensive library while she typed away at her novel, reading about the crowned heads of Russia, grilling her about stories of Tudor court intrigues and executions in The Tower of London and then watching The History Channel with my dad after he got home from work before going to bed. My family life was a dream of open-minded discussions with acceptance and praise of my grasp of such matters and I longed for an adult life filled with that feeling. Interesting that today, in my mid-twenties, in Seattle, I should get to write what I please for a living surrounded by so many intelligent writers. I’ve grown into my voice and used it to lead others in the pursuit of life at it’s best, on my own terms, whether people have liked it or not and that I am told is the definition of a Bellwether.