-Michael Cassio, Act II, Scene 3, lines 281-282 from The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare
I've always loved my church. It's one of the most purely, honestly fun places I know, somewhere I can feel safe and ask hard questions and do good works and sing excerpts from Broadway musicals and drop anime references. My church family is full of wonderful people whom I love being around.
The hard part is, my brother attends youth group functions with me now, and he's embarrassed by my reputation for being weird and loud and active in every discussion. This is a problem, because he believes my reputation reflects on his, and consequently often gets mad at me for being myself.
I don't believe that my reputation and his have anything to do with each other, and I resent that he's trying to change mine. Because what he doesn't seem to understand is that the reputation I have is the reputation I want, that I'm more comfortable not reining myself in the way he does, that it's better for me that people expect me to act the way I do naturally. He doesn't want any part of my reputation, but that's okay because I want nothing to do with his. He can have his image. I just want to be seen as myself, nothing else, and definitely not as an extension of my little brother's quest to fake a socially acceptable normalcy.
Home isn't a safe space for me anymore except when I'm locked in my room alone, because of my brother. School was always unpredictable--some classes would be safe, but some I always felt like I was constantly in danger. Church is the one place where I don't want to worry about my reputation, because I have to keep it under control everywhere else just to keep the bullying level down.
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