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you are sara lucille westerburg, you're 11 years old, and you're the straightest and most cisgender little girl you know. you don't even know what either of those words mean, for fuck's sakes! they just look like a bunch of gibberish to you.
being a boy does sound sorta cool to your mind, but it also doesn't feel right.
that must mean you're a girl... right?
you are sara lucille westerburg, you're 12 years old, and you have a "lesbian" friend by the name of luna.
she's a year older than you, and you met her during lunch when you were lonely and she made the effort to talk to you because she knew what it was like to be lonely. she just introduced that odd word to you, lesbian. apparently it means only liking girls.
maybe you should look it up more...?
you are sara lucille westerburg, you're still 12 years old, and you are a lesbian. you find girls attractive. it's as simple as that. you've never found men attractive, so you must like girls! and plus, lesbians have a complicated relationship with femininity, which you've found you have lately, so you've got to be a lesbian.
you keep forcing yourself to be attracted to the girls in your class, every last one of them, because it just doesn't come naturally to you. eh, it must be your autism.
you've just got to keep trying, and one day you'll find the crush that sticks to you! ...right?
you aren't sara lucille westerburg, you're 13 years old, and you definitely aren't a lesbian. you asked your friend luna about your feelings, and she introduced you to this thing known as "transgenderism", and it fits you even better than the term lesbian ever did.
except you're not a boy, which is what being a transgender man is, and you told this to her. in response, she told you there's a thing called being agender, where you have no gender, and that fit... perfectly, actually. she also told you about aromanticism and asexuality, when someone feels no romantic or sexual attraction, and it felt like you just found your home with these labels!
this feeling was amazing, you just had to tell your parents about it.
you aren't sara lucille westerburg, you're still 13 years old, and your parents weren't as pleased as you were.
they said you were being brainwashed, they said it was a phase, and they said you'd only ever be sara to them. it hurt, because you weren't sara and why couldn't they see that?
oh well. parents will be parents, and teens, in that same eternity, will be teens. you'll find a way to keep this secret, you always have.
you aren't sara lucille westerburg, you're still 13 years old, and you're now looking up the lgbta wiki on your school laptop in secret, like a child reading a forbidden book at night underneath the bedsheets.
you made a post to their forums about looking for name suggestions, and two lovely people by the usernames of "Adriann000" and "Nemosexual" were lovely enough to give you an entire list of names!
however, there were two that really stuck out; achilles and encore. it was kind of a love-at-first-sight thing, but you knew those were your names when you saw them for the first time. it felt genuinely euphoric, like no other feeling you could possibly describe.
you are encore achilles westerburg, you're 14 years old, and this is probably the first time in your entire life you've ever felt like you were being true to who you really were.
you went on the lgbta wiki more, found teens on there who were currently in the same situation you went through when you were 13, and you decided you would help them out in the same way those two people on the internet helped you. after all, they were so selflessly kind to you, and you felt like the one way you could pay them both back was to be nice in that same way to others.
you also grew closer to both of the people who gave you your names (one was named adrian and used he/him pronouns, and the other was named andy and used sun/suns pronouns), and those friendships were each so valuable to you, despite you never seeing their faces. it was something you cherished with everything in you.
you are encore achilles westerburg, you're 15 years old, you use xe/xem and he/him pronouns, and you're agender, crowgender, corruptigender, and aroace.
