In my family, I am the youngest child. Overall, expectations have always been placed on me to be as good as, if not better than, my older siblings. Most of those expectations were kind of unsaid and not really difficult to bear but some caused my family to look down upon me when I failed to meet them. All besides one. For some reason, those expectations carried over to relationships. I am the youngest in my family, being 2 years younger than my step-brother and 4 years younger than my sister. For whatever reason, I was expected to have as many relationships as my stepbrother. I never quite understood what was going on, but every other week he was dating a different girl. My mom and stepdad didn’t really expect me to have relationships as well, they just wanted me to be me and enjoy life. However when I went over to my father and stepmother’s place, I was always greeted with the “are you with anyone yet?”. It didn’t really hurt much but what did was that when I said no, the response at some point became “Are you gay?”. I don’t get why not actively dating would make my sexuality known to anyone. It made me uncomfortable that they were assuming my sexuality was something different then it was, merely because I was not actively dating a girl to prove my sexuality. It just made no sense to me and well, still doesn’t. I don’t get the expectations from my father that as a 10y/o I was expected to date otherwise I was doing wrong as I was not like my stepbrother. A few years ago I made it clear to them that it was an issue and I wanted them to stop and well, its caused a little awkwardness in our conversations when we talk about relationships as they are respecting my lifestyle choice.

Growing up I had good vision and was able to go about my life without missing anything with my eyes. This all changed when I got to third grade and I started to notice that things became blurry and almost illegible at a distance. The young me thought nothing of it at first, it was not until I started bringing it up to my mom that I realized that something was wrong and that I needed to go get my eyes checked out.

              I work on campus for a part of DoIT and this causes me to interact with other students and with professors. On campus the power dynamic is generally that professors are in a higher position and are to be respected always. When I am on the clock and assisting a user with an issue, I am providing a service to a user and about half of the time it is for a professor. So, when I go out to help with their ticket it can go one of two ways. They either see me as a student who is there to “help” and behave very rudely as if I do not know what my own job entails, with them trying to tell me how to perform a certain task for my job when it is the primary thing we do. Or they respect that I am a working member of DoIT as I am providing a service to them, and they trust that I will resolve the issue.

I looked at myself as an ally for all my life but, looking back now, I put on the mask of a helper and fully convinced myself that I was making a difference by following the cause, but I never really acted for the better of it. In college I became an affiliate of the Center for Women in Technology, an organization at UMBC fighting for equality for all. CWIT opened my eyes to the issues that plague today’s society and how I could assist in the fight for equality. I am surprised that a course like my first-year experience for CWIT is not mandatory for everyone. I feel like a simple course like this being worked into all high school curriculum would make a world of difference in the visibility of today’s issues and gather more support for the cause. Coming out of high school, I knew these problems existed, but they were not in the front of my focus because I am a cis white male. I did not have to experience the pain that comes with most of them, however I did secondhand experience them through my mom and stepmother.