An insightful article in the tongue-in-cheek newspaper the Onion (www.theonion.com) caught my attention recently.  The February 13, 2002 issue carried the following story:  "Holocaust museum cashier has yet another depressing day."  The article told of a young cashier at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who had "a seemingly endless string of depressing days," finding "it exhausting to reflect upon the moral and theological questions raised by the Holocaust nearly nonstop for 40 hours a week."  The moral of the story was that enveloping oneself in darkness can erase one's will to go on.

After reading this, I realized that the worst years of my life were spent brooding over something--odd sexuality, culture shock, peer groups, and my future. The brooding nearly drove me to insanity (at least I think so). Even the couple months I spent researching and writing a project on the Holocaust impacted my psyche in general.

These days, I feel a bit more at peace with myself. I've stopped thinking about sexuality. It wasn't a conscious decision--it just happened. Does this mean I deny what I think is beautiful? No, but I see beauty like the artist I used to be saw beauty:  purity of form, features, and countenance.  I see beauty in people first and foremost.

(Then again, who am I kidding? It was only a couple days ago when, standing on a bus, I felt an odd rush when my bare arm had the opportunity to come into prolonged contact with the bare arm of a female passenger. The feeling of skin-to-skin contact like that was foreign and alien to me, and the realization made it seem painful. In retrospect, it's most painful to even have reacted that way.)

I still tend to brood at times. Will I be able to conform to the local school system enough to be free? Will I be able to go to a college of my choosing, instead of a college of my parents' choosing? What troubles me the most is balancing what I think I want, and what I think I need out of life. I want a shining career in something like acting or writing. Will I get it? No, not likely. Would it be a satisfying lifestyle? Who knows? I detest the notion of a quiet, obscure mediocre life, even though it seems to have worked for many.

Now I'm getting off track.  What I mean is that perhaps we must take a big step back from viewing a particular angle of our lives very closely (in this case, BL). We need to put everything in perspective. In my untrained opinion, if people get obsessed about being BL, they'll lose touch with reality. People define their entire existence on perspective. Centuries of only looking at things from the ground made people believe the Earth was center of the universe, when in reality, it's just a speck in a giant moving complex of creation. Being a BL does not define who we are and it is not the center of our existence.

Haley Elliot is a tenth grade student.  His hobbies include writing and acting.