Hoo boy. the start of my teen years were CONFUSING AF. Despite the custody battle dying down quite a bit, it never really ended, and I ended up moving around a lot as a kid. It would be quite a while before we'd actually settle down in one school system. Naturally, this ended up making it so I was usually the new kid in a lot of communities. People didn't really speak to me much and my distant nature as a kid kept people away for the most part. My family situation kept me feeling like I had to keep masks on, appeasing each side in whatever view they held. I lived with my mom's side of the family, and while she did her best to provide for me and my brother, She was constantly away working. A while later, my older brother would move back over to live with my dad. With no family around and no friends around loneliness became my norm. Talking about things was hard when no one was around to hear you out. Slowly and surely, I was becoming an empty shell. Nice enough to talk to, and kind enough, but never any substance behind the mask I wore to make it easier for people to like me. I stopped really feeling for a while, but eventually, the moving stopped and we moved out to the boonies. For once, I was able to have something stable to hold onto. I started interacting with people more. Mom got me involved in 4H, and while it wouldn't fix my MANY people problems at the time, it would at least allow me to learn how to interact like a normal person. Feelings slowly crept back into me. Speaking of feelings, this is where my very first gay clue happened. I remember we stopped at a walmart between my mom's and dad's places, and I went off on my own to explore. I loved to read at the time, because books allowed me to pretend like I had friends, aside from usually being a good story. While I was looking over the books, I had managed to scroll aaaaaaaaall the way over to the magazines. My mind wandered over the beautiful women on the beauty magazines, to rest over the body building magazines. Suddenly a dude with a WELL sculpted physic was right before my eyes, and I felt all aflutter and distracted. So I did what any kid that didn't know what to do with those feelings, and bottled them up and ran. This would be the very first of many MANY hindsight *You really should've known you were gay* moments of my life.