My Story <3

Hello, my name is Angel and I am a 17 year old genderfluid person from A small town in New Jersey. My whole life I struggled with my own gender identity wondering why sometimes I felt as if being called a "boy" felt wrong and how I used to despise looking at my body or taking showers because I would have to face the fact that I was born biologically male and I just had to deal with it. All the way until this school year I did not know how to identify myself as and I believed I was transgender which caused me extreme fear and confusion on top of my already crippling anxiety and depression that weighed me down daily.

Life had a hard start for me, everything was fine until I was 6 and my mother and grandmother died leaving me to live with my grandfather in a trailer park for a year until my dad died a year from my mother leaving me alone and scared at age 7 and later that year my aunt adopted me as her son and I felt life was changing quickly. I was confused and scared most of my life because I began to develop romantic feelings for a guy I met on vacation in the Dominican Republic in 1st grade. I didn't understand what I was feeling and actually cried when I couldn't see him on the last day of my visit. I was upset for a while knowing I would never see him again.

I never even heard the word “Gay’ until my first year of middle school (6th Grade). It was a confusing time for me because I would still date girls and think girls were pretty and/or attractive but I never actually felt any form of connection with them romantically or sexually so for the longest time I had this warped idea of myself that I was “broken” or “damaged.’. It took me until 8th grade to fully accept myself and come out to all my friends as gay which shockingly had almost entirely positive reactions to it. However, I was forced out the closet back home. My sister found my skype messages I had with my at the time boyfriend who lived all the way in the U.K and she told my mother but my mother kept quiet about it. My step dad however was extremely angry at me when he read the text messages on my phone and saw the way I talked to my friends about other guys and how me and my boyfriend were doing. He yelled at me in the car and I felt even more heartbreak when my aunt confronted me later about it on another car ride where she was crying and saying things like “your parents are rolling in their graves.” or “you're going to hell for this!’

Over time they accepted it. One day I was scrolling through google searching terms like “Why do I feel like a boy but a girl at the same time?” and after months of searching the term “Genderfluid” came up with the exact definition of how I felt and I felt liberated. I started feeling more confident and empowered in my life. When I started Junior Year I began going to counseling in my school to assist with my anxiety issues.We discussed my gender identity and my counselor told me to come out to my aunt now to avoid complications in the future. I left a note for my mother and left the house for a few hours and when I came back she kept saying to me “I don’t understand” and “So your like Caitlyn Jenner?’ and again just as before she began to cry. She told my other sister and we argued at dinner that night and I knew then it was going to be a long road ahead of me. Fast forward to now and I am the happiest I have ever been in my life. It's a one step at a time journey that I know I have to take and I want other Genderfluid teens or even adults out there to know that you are not alone at all and we all have to move towards happiness one step at a time.