It's hard enough growing up in this peer pressured world without being ridiculed. To have your name immortalized in fear by the tyrants that we try to maintain as friends or at least friendly’s. Our every thought is consumed by being accepted and pressured to fit in. We often do things that go against who we are just to bask in that moment's glory, eventually to be slammed back down to reality.

Every teen faces this mockery of existence. We travel along our borrowed time bouncing from one emotion to the next without giving anyone of them a chance to make a difference. Our lives blindly revolve around the fashion that is forced in our face to keep us hip. We are the clock that ticks in the heartbeat of life, but we have no control over our systematically influenced lives.

This is not even the beginning of the wretched world that we must live in. There is more to the story of life that is bombarded on us in ritualistic, rhythmic patterns. The biggest is hate. Every hour, there is some report, some news flash of hate that penetrates our emotional battered lives. There are many forms of hate on several different levels. The worst is the hate that happens when a person is just different than those around them.  

So when a teen starts to realize they is different, and does not have the emotional or physical support to justify their ability to reason, that is when the downfall emerges. The ridicule that one faces in these public displays of contempt is everlasting and emotionally scarring.  

To be gay in a world that fears what it doesn't understand is catastrophic in molding the self confidence of our lives. The constant struggle within is enough to break some, even to destroy others. To hide in fear of being banished from what we call our life. Living in constant fear of the reprisals that do threaten our every existence is beyond what anyone would have to endure. Yet everyday there is some tragic event that makes open up to the fact that this world has a closed heart. It is hard growing up in a world that cannot even grow up itself.  

This brings us to the meaning of being ashamed. We should be!