Looking at my late-90s high school diary, you would assume I was a regular horny straight teen girl. The reality was very different | Rebecca Shaw

The amount of time, brain space and energy it takes to live not as yourself is remarkable - and draining

A few weeks ago while living through hell (moving house), I stumbled upon my late-90s high school diary, the one that I would take to class every day in regional Queensland. It is an artefact of its time, before newfangled technology like laptops and having the internet in other places besides one room of your school. It's also an artefact of its time in another important way: it is completely covered in images of hot guys of the time.

Looking at it, you would assume that I was a regular horny straight teen girl, cutting out photos of Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith and Hanson to plaster all over my diary so the world could see my very-normal-don't-look-too-closely-ha-ha desire for men. Well, it may shock you to learn that I wasn't a normal straight teenage girl. I was a deeply closeted and sad teenage lesbian. I knew that something was different about me from about 11, even though at the time I hadn't met any gay people, there were no gay people in pop culture, and there was no Google to ask why am I weird".