When you’re a 17-year-old, regardless of your gender, orientation, race, or religion, you’re a bundle of nerves, angst, misplaced anger and emotion, and you tend to make stupid decisions because of those emotions. When I was 17, I was going through all of that turmoil and angst, and made two very important decisions: the first being to dropout of high school and run away and live with my then drug dealer boyfriend (ten years my senior), and the second decision was that I agreed to be a co-director of the Fairy Forest of our local Renaissance Festival for that year. These two decisions were made almost around the same time, and both had an enormous effect on each other, and on the trajectory of the rest of my life.