Please stop calling me brave

By Dylan

Every day I wake up in an empty bed and get ready to go out into a hostile world. Not a world that I fear — just a world that doesn't want me around. I look in the mirror and search for the things I'll be judged for. The little things that others don't have to worry about, but apparently I do.

It's tiring. It's lonely. It's downright exhausting. But it's my life, and I'm planning on living it the best I can.

This is not brave. This is my existence. It was a choice that everyone calls brave because of the open hatred, the ridicule, and the general being shunned. It is not brave — it was a choice of survival.

My point is not that I don't fight for the small joyful moments I get to live, because I fight tooth and nail for those. And it's not that I didn't know people would hate me — because they told me every step of the way.

It's that the very premise of being brave for choosing to be myself is part of the problem. That viewpoint justifies the people who hate me for no reason. It steals the hope I felt in my heart that things might somehow get better. And it tells me that because I "chose" this, it is somehow my penance — that I must live it because I chose not to die.

It may sound harsh, but think about it for a moment. You might not mean it that way consciously, but underneath it all, if you view me as brave, you see me as radical — as going against the normal. Not as a person trying to survive and find someone to love them, simply because they are true.