(Disclaimer: These are my experiences and every young LGBT person has had different ones. However, I feel that my story highlights some of what many LGBT people, particularly lesbian or bisexual women, face growing up.)

At four-years-old, I was Barney’s biggest fan. My mother and I would watch a group of happy-go-lucky children dance around the purple dinosaur every morning. Once, she asked me in passing if I happened to have a crush on one of the boys on the show who I had been talking about. At first, I was nervous, "Am I supposed to say yes?"

As a four-year-old, I obviously had no romantic feelings yet. It turns out, though, my mom was using this as an opportunity to let me know that any crush I had would be valid no matter what. She told me something along the lines of: “It’s OK if you don’t like him, of course. It’s normal not to feel that way yet, and when you do, it’s OK if you don’t like boys. If you do like boys, then that’s cool too. But just because I like boys doesn’t mean that you have to, and I will always love you no matter what.” It would take me years to realize how lucky I was to have such accepting parents.

I didn’t think much of the conversation until about a year later, when I went to kindergarten. In class, I had a friend named Trenton, who was very nice and seemed like the kind of boy I was supposed to like. I thought I had a crush on him, and it’s possible that as a five-year-old, I did (as much as you can when you’re five). The notable part of that is I remember making the conscious decision that this was the boy I liked. After all, wasn’t I supposed to have one? Wasn’t that just the natural way of things?

Even though I knew I had my parents’ support no matter my sexuality, and they had always made that clear, that wasn’t enough to release society’s hold on me. So this progressed into me making small decisions to like boys until soon enough, it felt like it was coming naturally. I would confuse platonic for romantic feelings for boys on TV or boys in my class. By middle school, I was having what I confused for full-blown crushes on boys. Later, I would realize that this was me wanting their approval on an unhealthy level. I found out eventually that this was a common experience of young women who would later turn out to be gay.

Looking back on this, I think about all the other girls who I have spoken with, or whose articles and posts I have read, that align with these experiences in some way. That is, as a girl, from the time you can comprehend your surroundings, a thousand societal forces come together and tell you that you have to like boys, and if you don’t, then you don’t make any sense. Boys and girls liking each other is “just how it is.” This makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between genuine and forced heterosexuality when you are older. This is a concept that has been discussed by researchers, and the phrase "compulsory heterosexuality" was coined by Adrienne Rich in 1980 to describe it. (Seriously, reading her article about this concept opened my eyes so much. I highly recommend!)

If you were a young girl like I was, and you could tell you weren’t necessarily straight, you were likely already doing mental gymnastics to pair yourself romantically with boys, because the idea that you’re somewhere on the LGBT spectrum is terrifying. You already know from a young age that if you’re gay, bi or especially if you're transgender, life is going to be hard. You’re going to be different, and in a lot of cases ostracized. I know that I, at least, was aware of that when I was younger, and so I blocked out my sexuality for as long as I could. Even as one of the lucky kids who knew I had my parents’ support, the guilt that the rest of society — movies, TV shows, homophobic comments and religious opposition to LGBT rights — gave me for being a lesbian stuck with me for years. It still creeps up on me, but I have learned to fight it off.

Once I was in middle school, I reached my peak level of confusion. I was going through my conservative Christian phase, which was toxic for me because I was around people who thought being LGBT was wrong. I had never admitted to myself at that point that I had crushes on girls because it made me feel guilty, but the feelings I had for boys felt unhealthy. I was far more attracted to girls, but I wrote that off as being the effect of a society that objectifies women.

I became even more confused because while not all media was openly homophobic, the lack of LGBT representation in media made me wonder if being with women was even a real option. Sure, there was Ellen DeGeneres and her wife that I’d hear about when my mom watched E! News and the occasional gay or lesbian couple showed up on TV, but that was nowhere near as comprehensive as the examples of men and women together that I saw everywhere, all over school, all over TV or in movies like “The Notebook” that were talked about nonstop by my friends.

To make a long story slightly shorter, I will just say this of my experiences with boys: oops. I only ever dated two boys (or one, if you don’t count middle school “relationships”), and what I should’ve gathered from those situations was that I was not straight, because something never felt right. When my relationship with a long-term boyfriend ended, my entire life became clearer to me. Almost immediately, I had my first real crush on a girl. Six months later, I began coming out to my close friends as bisexual, and I was identifying that way for a long time, until the stress of my first year of college gave me the realization that I would never feel that way about men on a genuine level, and that it was totally fine not to. Now here I am, and I’ve never felt more comfortable with myself than since the day I started referring to myself as gay.

Rather than speaking about the experiences of LGB women in general, I chose to tell my own path to realization because I think it shows how much LGBT people’s identities are affected because of who they love or, in the case of transgender people, the gender they were “born with” versus the gender that they are. Personally, I can only speak of the LGB part of the acronym — for years, I was scared for my own well-being and even my eternal salvation, just because of the fact that I love differently than the majority. If that doesn’t show you that there is still a problem, I don’t know what will.

As far as I am concerned, every person deserves to be with someone they love, no matter their gender. This kind of companionship is a basic need for most adults at some point in their lives, and yet, there are still so many people that say it isn’t natural if it’s a same-sex couple. I would love to ask those folks what sounds more natural: being in the eighth grade and “liking” a boy because you think he’s better than you and you want his approval, or being in high school and meeting a girl who you genuinely cared about, understood, and wanted to spend all of your time with? At least for me, the answer to that question is clear.

A lot has happened recently that brought me to terms with my sexuality. When marriage equality became federal law in 2015, I cried tears of joy, because I realized then that I was probably going to marry a woman. When the tragic Pulse nightclub shootings happened an hour from my house in June, I wanted so badly to speak out about it as a member of the Orlando LGBT community, and I quickly realized that when I spoke about it, I’d want people to know I was a lesbian. It's been a long time coming, but I have never felt more like myself, and I hope that any young LGBT person reading this knows that it can and will get better for you. The love in your heart is enough.

When I was little, I never planned my dream wedding like many other girls. It wasn’t until recently that I wanted to because finally I was allowed to picture a bride standing on the other side of the aisle.