I just do not know how to describe it. It is just my preference of liking. Many people just don’t understand why. Some just accept it. Others criticize it. I’ve gotten used to the teasing… most of the time. I’m sitting in class with the rest of the students attending. Some of them are absent because of illness, family affairs, or just deciding to skip school for a day and not give a squee about it. A note passes along when the teacher, Ms. Richard, is not looking. No one bothers looking at the note when it is not meant for them. When I turn my head, I can see the note slowly getting closer to me. When the note finally reaches me, I get to have the task of opening it up. The yellowish paper says:”JEREMY” on it with big letters and underlined. Opening up the paper, I quickly glance at the teacher to see if she is looking or not. Luckily, she isn’t. I open the note and it says: “Hey, Jeremy. You want to go play princess after school? LOL!” My face does not show any emotion or expression whatsoever. This is how it is everyday, except with different notes each time.
Ever since I decided to start being “myself”, life hasn’t been the same. People do not understand why I like the things I like. You see, I have two younger sisters. Since I am about to turn fifteen in less than a month, I will technically be eight years older than one of my sisters and ten years older than the other. For the past few years, my family has been having economic troubles, so we couldn’t afford many luxuries or toys. When this started, my sisters were the only ones who had toys. This was because they were more spoiled than me… at least that is what I am assuming. Because my parents didn’t have enough money to buy me any toys, such as Hot Wheels and G.I.Joe, the only toys I could play with were my sisters’ toys. When I found out about this, I whined to my mother for hours saying, “But moooom… those toys are for GIRLS! I’m not a girl!” She didn’t listen to me, but she tells me that she still loves me.
I remember the first day I walked into my sisters’ room and saying, “Mom says I can play with your toys.” My sisters gave me weird faces, but then let me play with them. My face blushed and I hung my head down in shame while walking across the room. All I could see is pink and purple. My sisters handed me a handful of toys, ranging from Barbie, Littlest Pet Shop, My Little Pony, and many more. My sisters wanted to tease me a little though, so they put a light blue hat on my head. The hat was made out of cotton and soft fabric. It was rounded, much like a winter hat people would wear on a winter day, and had two little bumps at the top, which looked like little stubby horns. My sisters tried to hide their laugh, but they could not help it. I blushed and slowly scooted away from them to play with the toys alone. After a couple months, I started getting used to it. I was fond of the idea of using these dolls and figures to create my own little world. I could make them do whatever I wanted, and it was not as rough as men shooting each other with machine guns or cars going fast and crashing into each other. These interests carried on with me for the rest of my life up to this point. I still wear the light blue hat because I thought it looked adorable on me. I still play with my sisters’ toys, but some have grown old on me. Half of the toys weren’t even popular anymore, so the companies stopped making new ones of that certain franchise. The only one that really stuck out to me was the My Little Pony franchise.
Ever since the new TV show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, had aired, my sisters couldn’t stop watching it, and since I was usually with them, the show grew on me too. We would all watch the show together everyday on the same couch. Sometimes we were on the floor. The show would make us smile and we would all laugh together. It was one of the only times we really “bonded”. The other thing that sticks out to me about this certain franchise was about the community, which I found out about a couple weeks after starting to watch the show. There is this huge fandom of the same show called “Bronies”. I was so joyful knowing that there were more guys out there who liked the same show as I did, even though it was usually meant for my sisters’ age group. From that moment and on, I called myself a brony.
Middle school and Jr. High were pretty fun. My classmates were kind and a lot of them wanted to become my friend. The only catch was that they did not know about my liking for girly toys and TV shows, such as My Little Pony. If they ever found out, they might not want to be my friends anymore. I could get picked on for ages. So I kept it a secret. I met some of my best friends at that time, such as Nick, Daniel, and Zach. We stuck together throughout all of Middle School and Jr. High. We always talked about guy stuff, such as basketball and football teams, even though I never have seen the sport, so I did not know almost any of what they were talking about. When I would get home from school, my sisters would rush towards me and jump around saying, “Jeremy, come play! We got the new pony toy!” I didn’t know if it was normal guy behavior to be excited about those kinds of things, but I didn’t care. I would kick off my shoes and run upstairs with the two. I had awesome school friends, loving sisters, and awesome toys to play with. This all started to change when I transitioned into High School.
