Many people have told me that becoming a writer would be a waste of time. Who would want to read my writing? Who would even be interested in it? They posed so many questions against my choice of becoming a writer that I've lost some interest in this dream job. I've lost interest in many things due to people criticizing what I do.

Throughout my life, I have lived a constant replay of "You'll do this" or "No, you won't do that because I say so." My entire life was motorized. I was tied with strings that ended wound up in a cross-shaped controller, and anybody who was older than me was the puppeteer. I was allowed to watch certain TV shows, listen to certain music, hang out with certain people. In my life growing up, I was never allowed to make mistakes.

It felt like I was being built up by everybody else to fit the image of the perfect human being that they envisioned— to be who they wanted me to be, not who I felt like I wanted to be. If I ever made the smallest of mistake, I had committed the worse offense toward people that would never be forgotten. Maybe forgiven, but never forgotten. I was taught to be perfect in a way that stopped me from doing things that others thought of as impure.

Acting in a "deviant" way was never an option for me. My goal was always school: straight As and all that shit. Getting a B was like getting an F. The disappointment of getting a B in my family was tremendous. I would have to study more to raise my grades, if not... I never wanted to find out how that sentence finished. Choices were made for me throughout my entire life. Maybe the only choices I ever got to make were what books I wanted to read or deciding to move to the US. My parents were against my first relationship. They said that they didn't like her and that I should break up with her. Now, I'm dating a guy, and they found out and they are trying to "fix me."

Even if I am far from the incarcerators that once tried to cuff me, even while miles away from them, they're still trying to maneuver each of my limbs and each of my thoughts.

It's so exhausting. Trying to find yourself when you never had a sense of individualism is pretty hard. And sometimes, it seems futile. You might not really know what you really like; you'll lose interest in the things you were forced to like; you might start doing things that aren't good for you because you just don't know what the heck.

It's all smiles and rainbows when you have somebody telling you what to do, but once you grow out of that shell you feel alone and helpless, and that is the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody.