He told me once, “You know, you're really very strange.” He wasn’t the first. Dozens of people have said the same or implied it, have whispered it behind my back or said it to my face, and have used the term “freak” as everything from a compliment to an insult. There are those who saw my quirks and my sense of humor and my broken pieces in the harsh light of day and brushed me off as nothing more than a waste of space and I have known others who accepted me just as I am, no questions asked. That does not surprise me. What does is how little people really know about me when they make that initial choice to stay or go. They think I'm strange now? Oh, they don't know the half of it.
They are not spies or fortune tellers, they cannot see behind closed doors. They don't know about the anxiety, the panic attacks, the built up stress and the OCD, and the endless struggle not to let these things inhibit me or my view of the world. They don't know about the involved routines I get caught up in and the days I've stopped eating in an attempt to control my disorder. They do not see me when I come undone, when my body feels like it's shutting down, sometimes for no reason, when my palms sweat and my vision blurs and my hands and feet go numb. They don’t understand the hidden dark days when the cloud of worry hanging just above my head descends and wraps me in its thick fog, when my breath speeds up until it feels as though I am not even living off the oxygen in my lungs anymore but the adrenaline in my veins instead. They don't realize what it is like to have your entire body screaming at you that you are terrified, that something is wrong, for no outside reason that you can pinpoint and try to explain away.

For a long time I thought the only easy way to keep myself safe from criticism or rejection was to hide it. Every piece of me that did not fit in the box marked “normal” I shoved under the rug, even if my self-esteem went with it. Every moment of weakness, every unstable piece in the carefully constructed block tower of my personality had been hidden deep inside the fragile structure, far from the light of day. I spent weeks guarding it, praying that no one would come and knock it over with clumsy hands, exposing me to the world and crushing my facade. My friends were kept at a distance, because I didn't even trust them with my secrets or my failures.
But then came the day when it happened. When, for the first time, I opened up a little, let someone see the inner parts of me that weren't so perfect, that crumbled against my fingertips if I dared to touch them. And although it wasn't a perfect Lifetime movie moment, it was something. They didn't run away screaming. They stayed. I was safe.

And slowly I gathered around me a group of people who were braver than I ever thought of being, who told me their stories so I felt free to tell mine, people with cuts on their arms and bruises and scars and dirt under their fingernails, people who were haunted by words like fear and abandonment and depression and mistakes but who lived words like hope and trust and beginnings. So, while I still sometimes hide from the critics, I offer this part of my story to the freaks of this world, because it is their story too. We are the misfits. We reach out to each other across the room and across the nations. We entwine our hands and close our eyes and whisper as one, “It will be alright, it will be alright, it will be alright.” And as the sky burns and the rain falls down icy cold, we shiver and cough and thrive and believe as one, celebrating our existence because we know now we are not alone in any form of the word. And I don't care what people say, “freak” should not be synonymous with loser. My friends and I are not losers, we are fighters, who live everyday with an inexhaustible hope, who stutter and trip and fumble our way through life, who work that much harder just to get through the day with a smile. We are unstoppable, but more importantly, we are people, with issues and faults and a backbone of iron even when our knees are jelly. We are not “that one kid with the problem”, we are warriors. And despite the disappointments, the days when we crawl through the mud just to be greeted by looks of skepticism and doubt we will never, ever give up hope. Remember our names, because we are the freaks who will change the world.