It wasn’t always easy, but it gave me a lot of valuable resources and ideas. The most important lesson that I learned is that you can’t change someone's opinion, because you can’t have a wrong opinion.

Disclaimer: I mean no offense to anyone who has conservative views. This is my view on growing up in a household that wasn’t conservative, and a community that was.

Premarital sex is a sin

Sitting in health class on the day we learned Sex Ed was always so uncomfortable, you were surrounded with both kids that could teach the class on human anatomy and then kids that hadn’t even mastered their kissing yet. The teacher would sit up in front of you and explain that basically, the only way not to get pregnant was to not have sex, and if you had sex, you were a terrible person. Okay, so they never straight out said that you were a terrible person, but it was strongly implied. Then they would briefly go over birth control and condoms, and that was that.

Lesson learned: If you want to have safe sex, don’t have sex. If you want to be a good future wife, don’t have sex. Some people would say these are a little dramatic and totally false, but in my high school, people really did believe this. No one talked about sex. It wasn’t for pleasure; it served one purpose, and that was to create a life. My freshman self was pretty shocked when my mother finally clued me in on the fact that sex was more than just creating a baby.

You shouldn't show your body

My school had a strict dress code, which was fine to an extent. But sometimes it crossed the line. Take, for example, tank tops.

It was fine for a guy to wear tank tops, or shirts that were so tight around his arms that they more than likely would rip, but I couldn’t wear one because it showed my shoulders. The lesson I didn’t learn from this was to dress with class, the lesson I was taught was that because I am female, it’s my job to keep males from getting “distracted” by my body. This results in covering it up, from shoulders to cleavage, if. If it was still a distraction, I got sent to the principal's office and received a lecture, while that guy in the bro tank got to stay in class. It’s not so much the dress code, it was more the reason behind it. If my school would have said, “Hey, be classy," I probably would have actually followed the dress code.

If you don't follow the majority views, you are a terrible person

Believe it or not, I once heard a girl whisper this behind me when I said that I thought it should be a women’s right to get an abortion. I may have been obvious with my liberal views on the world; I stated them quite frequently in class, and it usually started an agreement (more than often this was for my own personal pleasure), but teachers very rarely supported the freedom of expression. They more than likely shut down the comment and moved on, or said to check my facts. Here is the thing; my opinions weren’t wrong, they were my views, and the only thing that was wrong was that they weren't what the majority thought.

It's okay to be different

While I wasn’t so popular in high school for having a different opinion, I learned that it’s important to stand up for what you believe in, even if that means you don’t make friends along the way. I also learned that there is nothing wrong with not having the same ideas has someone else. And that after all, opinions are never wrong.