It is only the beginning

I was flipping through my notebook recently, the one where I do all my writing, and I found something interesting.

In bold and large lettering I had penned out the words: The 2007 'Real-Me' Project. Pages after detailed a highly thought out plan on how to make me a better me. It was astonishing to me.

A year ago, I set out to start a project that I was not ready for. I was young, I had no experience to go on in many areas in life (least of all love), but more importantly I was missing something that is vital in a process like that: motivation. I really had not one reason to start the project other than to start it.

It was a great thought, but there was nothing to back it up. I sit here a year later, a year older, and only now am I ready to begin the journey to discover my deepest potential. I have gone through so much this past year. Being a senior, learning responsibility, keeping myself busy and more importantly I was growing.

I fell in love and I got hurt and then I turned 18. It wasn't anything significant to me before, except I'm beginning to realize as each day passes that I'm not a child anymore. I'm different - I'm different and my life should reflect that.

Now, I believe, is the right time to begin that project that I had naively started all those months ago. I've started working out, I've gotten a job and I'm loving my life. It is not the same life as it was before, it is somehow irrevocably changed, more so than I thought it would be when I was 17. I'm beginning to learn things about myself and about other people in my life that continue to amaze me.

I'm scared, I'm hopeful, I have way too many expectations, but I know that I have to stop waiting for my life to begin and I just have to start...living. All this time I've been thinking to myself that if I didn't have love, then my life was meaningless, and that it meant there was something wrong with me. Well there was something wrong, just not what I thought.

I realize now that love can be found all the time, inside of myself. I don't need someone else to love me, to know that I am loveable. I will not wait on some guy to say that he cares, to start caring for myself. These are things that should be automatic, these are things that should already happen and somehow I was missing out on that message.

The road ahead has many new and unexpected things for a young man of 18. I've still so many things to learn and so many ways to grow that I don't know where to begin. All I know is, I'm going to do it being just myself instead of 'the-shy-guy' or - 'the-gay-guy' or 'the-slightly-overweight-guy'.

It may not be much and it is still a work-in-progress, but all the same. It's me.

And this? This isn't the end. It is only the beginning.

That's all.

Signed,

A Fabulous Gay Man,

Queen Trixie J.D. the First.