[Potential Trigger] "The twenty one year struggle for acceptance."

I've been gay for as long as I can remember and always was effeminate., I played with dolls as a child, bought toy dishes and pestered my mother to get the girls toy for my happy meals at McDonald's. Needless to say my mother never was really bothered by my orientation nor my admittedly flamboyant personality. (Although she never really got that I was gay until I was 15.)

I live in a pretty bad place for LGBT people. Northeast Mississippi. I went to a small school with very little funding and who once let a teacher with a under-aged kids penis on their phone go by forcing them to retire rather than call authorities. I had maybe a handful of friends, with only one that I hung around regularly. However, my school life was less than happy. The teachers were really hard on me. And no one listened to me when I was bullied or otherwise beaten for how I was. The teachers just said "Fight back." Fight back? How am I suppose to take on the same three kids almost every day? Not to mention they where athletes. Needless to say nothing was done in my twelve years of school. I ended up failing a year to stress and finally dropping out in eleventh grade. I couldn't do it anymore, when I failed I lost everyone I knew and where friends with since I was little and the new people where even more unforgiving. I had attempted suicide before I dropped out.

That was my school life in a nutshell, Not a lot of joy. My home life was no better, My only support was my mother. She took care of me and gave me a shoulder to cry on. The rest of the family hated me when they knew of my orientation. They tried to get my mother to send me to some straight camp, My uncle once beat me near an inch of my life during a argument. But worst of all, They bullied and mistreated my mother. They told her she hadn't raised me right among other things. Over time she developed stress related insomnia. My mother couldn't sleep at all without medication. Even with the medication she was prescribed she had to take more than the recommended dose to get to sleep. That leads into the more recent event in my life: Her overdose. My mother nearly died this past week and has been out of her mind until yesterday. During this time I received minimal help and sympathy from my family. my grandparents only helping me because they felt "Obligated" to help me. This didn't stop them from criticizing me most of the week.

I've made my mother suffer due to who I am, I know she doesn't blame me but I can't help but feel horrid. We don't have enough money to leave this place as much as I would like to leave all these bad memories behind. I'm sorry for this rant, I really am, But I had to place my thoughts and my feelings somewhere. Mostly I feel I need to talk about these things. I've kept it all in and had very few people to talk to about it. Mostly because I don't want to bother or worry anyone with my problems. But what I'm going through isn't normal or healthy, I realize that. I appreciate you taking the time to read this and I must once again apologize for ranting.