Trigger Warning: This Chapter contains Sensitive scenes like bullying, Readers discretion is advised.
When did you realize you were different from other people?
Different in the way you viewed the world, the way you understood things, the way you talked, walked, and responded.
From birth, society already has a role in your destiny, shaping parts of your personality before you even understood yourself.
Then your mind weighs the options.
Do you keep the personality the world handed to you, or do you throw it away and build a new one entirely?
For Persha, throwing it away was never really an option, especially when you come from a loving home.
A home where your existence was prayed for.
His mother and father tried for years after marriage to conceive, but luck never seemed to be on their side.
Then, nine years into their marriage, on the 14th of February, 2006, their one and only son was born into the world.
A beautiful baby boy that had everyone talking.
“Wow, what a beautiful baby girl,” some would mistakenly say.
“Oh no, he’s a boy,” his mother would quickly correct with a laugh.
“Oh my… really?
He’s so beautiful.”
“Hahaha, he’s going to be a heartbreaker when he grows up.”
“He’s definitely a model baby.”
Since the day he was born, people had already begun deciding his future for him.
His parents showered him with love, so his first real encounter with reality came in kindergarten.
“The girls’ line is over there, Persha,” one of the little kids said.
The classroom erupted into laughter, as though being compared to a girl was the worst thing imaginable.
That evening, his mother picked him up from school and immediately noticed the sadness written all over his face.
“Oh my beautiful boy, what’s wrong?” she asked softly.
His eyes welled with tears, and she quickly wiped them away, demanding to know what happened.
“They make fun of me,” he sobbed into her arms.
“They call me a girl.
Is it so bad to be a girl, Mama?”
For a moment, she didn’t know what to say.
She simply held him while he cried, thinking carefully about her answer.
Then she lifted his chin gently and wiped his tears again.
“Being a girl isn’t bad,mama was also a girl” she says soothing his cries ” my boy.
If they say that to you again, speak your mind, okay?”
And just like that, another card was added to the deck of his personality.
Confidence.
So by the time he turned nine and got bullied for dressing as a fairy during Halloween, he already knew how to survive.
“Look, it’s Persha the princess,” his classmates mocked.
They laughed loudly, expecting him to shrink under the humiliation.
Instead, he laughed with them.
“My dad dropped me off at school today,” he said casually.
“Who dropped you off, Tobi?”
He knew very well Tobi had no father at home.
The laughter died instantly.
Persha kept smiling while complimenting everyone else’s costumes as though nothing had happened.
After that day, Tobi never bothered him again.
Another card added to the deck.
Assertiveness.
Then came fourteen.
“Did you paint your nails?
Ew, you’re a boy.
Act like it,” one of his classmates, Stacy, sneered.
Persha examined his nails for a moment before looking back at her smug face.
“Sorry about that, Stacy.
It really isn’t my fault my family can afford pedicure sessions.”
He knew exactly how badly her family struggled financially.
The class burst into laughter.
And Persha laughed with them.
Another card acquired.
Power.
Years later, when he enrolled to study Business Administration so he could eventually take over his father’s company while pursuing his doctorate degree, he genuinely thought the world would have advanced by then.
It hadn’t.
At twenty years old and now in his second year, people still found ways to bully him.
He was tall, slim, and beautiful.
Too beautiful, according to society, for a boy.
And he was gay.
Everyone knew it, even before he fully understood it himself.
When he finally came out to his friends, they burst into laughter.
“Duh.
You’re literally the embodiment of the word gay,” one of them said.
“Oh wow, I didn’t know.
Shocking,” another replied sarcastically.
“Dude, you’re basically a glowing rainbow sign.
We knew already.”
Everyone knew.
Even his parents.
“Mom.
Dad.
I’m gay,” he announced one evening during dinner.
He watched their expressions carefully, searching for disappointment, anger, anything.
“Do they throw parties for that now?” his father asked dryly.
His mother gasped dramatically.
“Oh my God, honey, let’s throw a party and invite every…”
“No.
No, you don’t throw a party for that,” Persha interrupted quickly.
“Aren’t you angry?”
“Angry?” both his parents repeated at the same time.
“Yeah.
That I’m gay.”
They exchanged confused glances.
“My boy,” his father said gently, “why would we be angry?”
“You both struggled to have me, and I turned out gay.
You’re supposed to be angry.
I won’t be able to give you grandchildren.”
His mother sighed softly.
“You could always adopt, right?
Besides, we didn’t struggle to have you just so you could live the life we wanted for you.”
At that moment, Persha realized he truly had the best parents in the world.
No matter what happened, they would always stand beside him.
So entering a new semester believing society had evolved enough to stop making people like him a target did not seem unrealistic.
Unfortunately for Persha, reality had other plans.
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