Before You Judge Me,Read This First

My name is Ebube, I am 16 years old, and I don’t really know how to tell my life in a way that makes it sound simple or clean, because it has never been either of those things. My life has always felt like something I’m inside of while also trying to understand at the same time. Like I’m living it, but I’m also constantly analyzing it in my head, trying to make sense of why I feel the way I feel, why I attach to people the way I do, why I imagine things so deeply, and why reality sometimes feels lighter than what goes on inside my mind. I grew up in Nigeria, and that already shaped a lot of who I am. Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, constant way. I learned early that there are parts of yourself you show and parts you don’t. I learned how to behave in ways that made me acceptable, even when internally I felt very different. I learned how to be careful with expression. How to observe more than I speak. How to hide certain truths not because I was ashamed of existing, but because I was aware that not everything about me would be understood in the environment I was growing up in. One of the biggest truths about me is my sexuality. I am gay. And I didn’t discover it in a sudden moment like people sometimes imagine. It wasn’t like a movie scene where everything becomes clear instantly. It was gradual. It was in patterns. It was in attention I gave to boys. It was in emotional attachment that felt deeper than friendship. It was in the way my mind lingered on certain people, not just physically but emotionally. It was in how I felt seen or unseen depending on how a boy treated me, spoke to me, or responded to me. At first, I didn’t fully understand it. I just knew that my feelings didn’t always match what was expected around me. And that created a kind of quiet confusion inside me. Not confusion about who I was exactly, but confusion about how I was supposed to express it, or if I even could safely express it. So I became internal. I started living a large part of my life inside my head. And inside my head, everything is louder. My emotions are louder. My imagination is louder. My desires are louder. My overthinking is louder. When I like someone, I don’t like them lightly. I don’t experience attraction as something small. It becomes intense very quickly. I start imagining closeness. I start imagining attention. I start imagining emotional connection, consistency, being chosen, being important in someone’s life in a way that feels undeniable. And sometimes I confuse that intensity with something mutual, even when it isn’t. That pattern has shaped a lot of my emotional experiences. There was a boy I got very attached to. He was straight, and I knew that logically, but emotionally I didn’t treat that fact as something that stopped how I felt. At first, it was just conversation, just interaction, just normal presence. But slowly, it became more internal for me. I started thinking about him more than I should have. I started caring about how he saw me, how often he talked to me, what kind of attention I got from him compared to others. And without fully realizing it, I started building an emotional world in my head where I mattered to him in a deeper way than reality was actually giving me. I started interpreting small things as signs of closeness. I started hoping for more emotional importance than was actually there. But reality doesn’t adjust itself to imagination. And eventually, nothing developed into what I had emotionally constructed inside my mind. There was no ending conversation, no clean closure, just the slow realization that what I was feeling was not being reflected back to me in the way I wanted. That realization stayed with me longer than I expected. It made me think about myself in a different way. Why do I attach so quickly? Why do I build emotional meaning so fast? Why do I feel things so deeply even when the situation might be more casual for the other person? Even after that experience, I didn’t really change immediately. Patterns don’t break quickly. They repeat until you become aware of them in a more painful or honest way. There was another person I got emotionally involved with too. Someone I cared about deeply. I wanted consistency. I wanted emotional closeness that felt mutual. I wanted to feel like I wasn’t the only one investing emotionally into the connection. But that situation also didn’t last in the way I hoped. And eventually, it ended suddenly when I was blocked. That experience felt different because it wasn’t gradual fading. It was immediate silence. One moment there is access, the next moment there is none. No explanation I could hold onto. No conversation to process it properly. Just absence. And absence is heavy when your mind is used to replaying meaning into everything. I remember thinking about what I did wrong, even when I didn’t fully understand what I actually did wrong. I replayed conversations in my head. I questioned myself. I tried to find emotional logic in a situation that had already ended externally. That’s something I do often. I don’t let things go easily in my mind. Even when something is over physically, it continues internally for a while. I analyze it. I question it. I imagine alternative outcomes. I try to understand what could have changed, even when I don’t have full control over the situation. That kind of thinking contributes to my overthinking. My mind doesn’t naturally stay quiet. Even when I am alone physically, I am not always alone mentally. There is always something running in the background. Memories, imagination, future scenarios, emotional replay, self-questioning. There are nights where I lie down and my thoughts don’t settle. I think about people. I think about love. I think about myself. I think about the future. I think about conversations I had earlier in the day and how they could have gone differently. My mind keeps moving even when I want it to stop. And there was a time where all of that became too heavy for me emotionally. There was a moment in my life where I made a suicide-related call for help. I don’t describe it in a dramatic way in my mind. It wasn’t a movie moment or something aesthetic. It was simply a moment where I felt overwhelmed by everything I was carrying internally and I didn’t feel like I could process it alone at that time. It was a moment of reaching out because staying inside my head felt too intense. That moment didn’t define me, but it revealed something important about me. It showed me that when my emotions build up without release or grounding, they can reach a level where I feel completely overwhelmed. It made me realize I don’t always process emotional pain in small, manageable ways. Sometimes it builds until it feels too heavy. After that, I didn’t suddenly become okay. Life doesn’t reset like that. But I started becoming more aware of how I process emotions. I started noticing when I was overthinking too much or attaching too quickly or getting emotionally overwhelmed. There was also a period where I spent days in church. Not casually attending and leaving, but staying there for long stretches of time. It wasn’t because I suddenly became extremely religious or because everything in my life was perfect. It was because I needed somewhere quiet. Somewhere stable. Somewhere I could sit without having to explain myself or perform anything socially. In church, I could just exist. Even if my mind was still active, the environment gave me a sense of stillness externally. I would sit there for hours. Sometimes I felt a bit calmer. Sometimes I still felt heavy. But it gave me space away from my usual environment and my usual thoughts at home. Around that same time, something else happened that affected me more than I expected. My gadgets were stolen. At first, it might sound like just material loss, but for me it was deeper than that. My phone and my digital access were connected to my expression, my distraction, my communication, my online world, my content life. Losing them made me feel disconnected in a way I didn’t fully expect. It felt like part of my daily structure had been removed suddenly. Without my usual digital access, I was left more alone with my thoughts. And my thoughts are not always quiet or gentle. They are active, emotional, reflective, and sometimes overwhelming. That period made me realize how much I rely on external things to balance my internal world. Without those distractions, I had to sit more directly with myself. My feelings, my imagination, my loneliness, my overthinking. But even in all of this, there is another strong part of me that keeps pulling forward. I think a lot about my future. I think about becoming a content creator. I already have a t****k account with followers, but I haven’t fully stepped into the version of myself I see in my head. I imagine posting fashion content, GRWM videos, skincare routines, lifestyle clips, travel moments, restaurant experiences, aesthetic edits, dramatic videos, and maybe even podcast-style content. I imagine building a presence on t****k, i********:, and YouTube. I imagine having better equipment, better lighting, better setup, maybe even a better phone like an upgraded iPhone one day, not because my current one defines me, but because I associate tools with execution. I feel like there is a version of me inside my head that is more expressed than the version I am currently living out. I also care a lot about how I look. Fashion, appearance, skincare, presentation. When I feel good about how I look, I feel more aligned internally. It gives me a sense of control and expression. It is not just about validation from others, but also about how I see myself. And at the same time, I live with contradictions. I want love deeply, but I also get hurt by attachment. I want attention, but I also feel pain when attention is inconsistent. I want closeness, but I also fear being emotionally unchosen. So I exist in this space of wanting connection but also trying to protect myself from emotional imbalance. I am slowly starting to understand that a lot of what I chase externally is connected to things I have not fully learned to hold internally yet. I used to think the solution was finding the right person, the right attention, the right validation. But I am beginning to see that even the right person cannot fully stabilize what I have not yet stabilized in myself. So right now, my life feels like a transition. I am still emotional. I am still overthinking. I am still imagining. I am still attaching. I am still dreaming. But I am also becoming more aware of myself than I used to be. I am 16. I am still early in my life. I am still figuring out how I love, how I think, how I express myself, how I process emotions, how I build identity. I have had moments of confusion, moments of loneliness, moments of emotional intensity, moments of overthinking that felt too heavy to carry alone. But I am still here. Still becoming. Still learning how to exist inside myself without abandoning myself in the process.