Outspoken: Nicole
Higginbotham

I never fit in as a kid. When I was younger I mostly hung out with boys, catching frogs, snails, and snakes. But as I grew up, what once seemed OK suddenly made me different. Little by little my guy friends and I grew apart. I was a girl, so I was supposed to hang out with the girls. But they were into cheerleading and flirting with the guys. I was not.

Then I realized that I loved hanging out with the girls. Sometimes I would sit in the car with my friends, and I would think about how great it felt with just us girls.

But my junior year of high school changed everything. I fell for one of my best friends. Her name was Trisha. Eventually I decided to tell her how I felt. First, I told her that I was gay. She was a little nervous, but she took it OK. Then I decided to tell her that I had feelings for her. I wrote her a three-page note. The next day two of my friends came up to me and said that Trisha had freaked out and called both of them late at night. They said that she was thoroughly upset. Trisha stopped speaking to me.

That summer Trisha was all that I could think about. I was wondering how I could lose a friend whom I had known so long over the way that I felt. I expected her to understand. I started drinking. First, I drank beer, then tequila, and then vodka. I would drink alone to drown out all of the misery that I felt. When my senior year started I was going to school drunk. Friends whom I considered to be drunks were now calling me one.

But that ended in the middle of the school year when my family moved and I entered a new high school. I met another lesbian and we started a gay-straight alliance together. I started to feel a little better that there were other people like me out there.

I am still looking for a way to be comfortable and feel accepted. Right now I am currently attempting to graduate from college with an associate's degree, and I am in the delayed-entry program for the United States Air Force. I want to get stationed somewhere more open than the Midwest.