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Hey, I’m Charles. I recently came out as gay, and it's had its own... weird repercussions.
When I was 15, I had a girlfriend, Rebecca, and I really liked her, even loved her, but I felt weird, like... something was off. I started to notice that... I kinda liked boys more. And I mean I always liked them, I just didn’t realize it... I dated Rebecca for a while after this realization, but then I wanted to come clean to her.
I explained to her, as best as I could, that it wasn’t her but me. I still wanted to be friends with her, because she was such an important person to me. She was upset, but very supportive and understanding and I felt relieved.
Next, I confessed to all my friends. I expected them to mock me or, like, be surprised, but it was like... nobody cared that much, and some of them were even expecting it. It was so much easier than I thought it would be!
Of course, I expected that other people would soon find out, but I didn’t expect what happened next... one day at school I was searching through my bag for a book and then I found a... letter? I opened it, and there were... um, threats in there? Of course there were insults, but also stuff like, and I’m not quoting directly, but it basically said, “move to another school, we don’t need people like you here.” I looked around but there was nobody there. I felt scared. I thought that one of my friends was pranking me, but they would never do something like that.
I quickly forgot about it, but then it happened again. This time, someone DMed my Instagram anonymously with more insults and threats. I asked who it was, but they ignored me. The only person I shared this with was Rebecca, and she was so shocked by it!
But the final straw for me was when I found a weird box lying on my porch. I was glad I found it before my parents did. I opened it... and it was full of trash, and there was another letter on it that said, “You belong in here as well.” What!?
By this time I was so scared to go to school or anywhere else, I kept looking around, always searching for this mysterious person. I never told anything about this to anyone, not even to Rebecca.
Another thing happened a little later - one day, all of a sudden, everyone knew that I was gay. I had no idea how this happened, but I guess someone started to spread it to everyone they knew. You know, even teachers knew at this point. And, to be honest, it wasn’t that bad. Again, nobody cared about it that much, a lot of people were actually supportive of it.
There was just this one guy who I barely knew, Shawn, who kept staring at me weirdly. And not only that - he stopped saying, “Hello” to me and was always trying to keep as far away from me as possible. I thought he was a part of it, or maybe HE was the person who was sending me all those threats.
One day I came home and my parents started to ask me questions about my sexual orientation. I was like, “What?” I guess someone had told them already. It was crazy how fast the rumors were spreading. I asked how they knew and they said that someone’s parent had called them to ask questions. WHY were people so nosy!?
Well, I had to confess to them too! I can’t say that they were happy about it - we had an extremely long talk and they asked me a lot of questions. In the end, they had to start accepting it, because it’s not like I could do anything about it.
So, everyone knew. And it was nice. Many people struggle with it for years, but I got lucky, I guess. Except that someone was threatening me and I didn’t want to let it go. I was thinking about what I could do about it - maybe I should have gone to the principal or talked with the police, but I didn’t want to be too hasty about it.
I started to ask people around, especially my friends, if they knew anything about it. I even compared their handwriting to the one my, um, enemy had. Nothing came of this except that my friends were extremely annoyed with my suspiciousness. They thought that someone was pranking me and that was it, but I was pretty sure that it was something more serious and maybe sinister.
One person, who I still hadn't asked at this point was Shawn - he was still avoiding me and staring when he thought I couldn’t see him. So I went to him directly and asked why was he looking at me like that? He was like, “Um, what do you mean... what are you talking about?”
I was getting impatient with him, he definitely knew something, so I kept asking questions - even about the box and all those letters. He said, “Stop bugging me” and started to leave. And what could I do, stop him? But I was pretty sure that he was the one behind all of this.
Music by Epidemic Sound:
#actuallyhappened
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