The Beginning

When I was younger, I was really into blogging but as time went on I sorted of faded out. So here's to a new beginning and a little bit of storytelling.

To start off, my name is Kat. I'm a freshman in college and really, I'm just trying to find my way through this infinite oblivion that we call life. Through this blog, I hope to tell my story and maybe along the way, find a little more of myself.

When I was 13 years old, I started to realize some things about myself that I didn't like at the time. As a 7th grader, surrounded by annoying, judgmental, and arrogant people, it wasn't easy to be different. My whole life I grew up hiding from my peers. I wore baggy sweatshirts to hide my appearance, I kept to myself and shared as little as humanly possible, and I guess I could say I was the wallflower. I had my friends, mainly the ones from my soccer team growing up, but also a few from school. But I still never felt like I fit in, like I belonged, like there was a space for me in this world.

 It wasn't until high school that I finally started to come out of my shell and that was all thanks to sports. I was playing field hockey and lacrosse at the time and it was the one thing that made me feel alive. I made more friends, got closer to my older ones, and I was finally good at something. I became one of the popular kids. Not the cheerleader/football player kind of popular, but the kind where everyone in school knew my name and for some odd reason, liked me. But despite all of this, I still  stuck to my old self. The one who didn't share much but still managed to make everyone think otherwise.

Things got harder after freshman year. Between family problems, personal problems, and the intense course load I was taking, school, sports, and Netflix became my all. I started watching a TV show called The 100 and, one could say, became obsessed. I lived and breathed that show. I could, quite literally, tell you the episode number, title, and my favorite quote from each episode (even the scene that it happened in). Season 2 was an impact on me. A character named Lexa was introduced and she was an openly lesbian leader of the Grounders (a barbaric set of clans who remained on Earth after a nuclear apocalypse). She was the definition of a strong, empowered, female leader and never once did her sexuality hold her back. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

Like I said earlier, when I was 13, I started to realize I was different. I didn't look at boys the way I should have. I looked at this girl, one of my friends from sports, in a way that I knew wasn't "normal". And as time went on, as I met new people, as the hormones continued to emerge, those feelings only grew. And to be blunt, I hated myself for it.  So for the next 5 years, I kept to myself and pushed all of those feelings to the back of my mind and tried my best to be "normal".

Lexa, this character from The 100, was the beginning of a new me. I felt empowered because I related so much to her character. I felt like I could be that strong, empowered woman who wasn't defined by her sexuality, and so I let those feelings, those thoughts, back to the forefront of my mind and started to process them. I learned to accept and love myself, I learned to see myself as "normal" (and although I'm sure some of you will disagree with me on that, I don't care what you think, I'm proud of who I am).

I finally came out to my parents on March 26, 2016. To say "come out" isn't exactly true. My mom and dad had been talking and the question of my sexuality came up. My mom thought I was too boy crazy (little did she know I was playing it up so they thought I was straight) but my dad said he knew since I was a kid. So the next day my mom just asks me. I burst into tears because I was done lying, done hiding, and I was one of the lucky ones. My family welcomes it with open arms and have been supportive of it ever since.

Slowly I started to tell my close friends, my best friend being the last of my close friends to find out. And the day before Memorial Day Weekend, I came out to everyone. In my English class, we wrote and read aloud Occasional Papers. These are personal essays about an occasion that taught you something. By writing about them and reading them, you're meant to share the lesson you learned and hopefully help someone else see it too. Well, the last 5 years of my life had been one big lesson, a mess of a lesson but a lesson none-the-less. So I wrote about that and everything that I came to learn from it. And again, I was accepted for it. After class, I tweeted pictures of the paper for every one of my followers to read and I considered myself "out".

So now that you know that piece of the story, I guess I can say that the start to this blog post was a success. I won't be blogging about cooking recipes, politics, or DIY stuff like most of the other blogs out there (although they are all amazing and helpful). This blog, like I said earlier, is just going to be about experiences I've had. Similar to an Occasional Paper, I guess you could say. It's about the little things I've learned along the way, maybe some reminiscing here and there (and no it won't be all LGBT related, but there will probably be a lot of it). But for all intent and purpose, it's going to be A Day In The Life Of Me.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will all continue to follow this blog to hear about my journey through life.