On a breezy Saturday morning in mid-June, I rose from my dorm room bed and boarded an “El” train from Evanston to Boystown, a historically LGBT neighborhood in Chicago, with the hopes of experiencing my very first Pride Parade. I was attending a two-week seminar at Northwestern University, and I was offered a chaperoned trip to Chicago Pride with a small group of other students. For me, everything was new – the people, the college campus, the seminar-style classroom – and this unfamiliarity sparked a bravery in me to do something I had always longed to do, to experience my queerness in an entirely new way.

Our train dropped us and a car full of other excited parade attendees a short walk from where the parade would begin. Growing up in a privileged, conservative suburb, I felt a certain sense of ownership of the city – but only the parts I had seen on holiday excursions and school trips, like the Sears (never Willis) Tower, the museums peppered along Lake Shore Drive, and the freezing beaches of Lake Michigan. Boystown was completely foreign to me, but the sheer concentration of pride flags and memorabilia dotting the surrounding shops and apartments delighted me beyond words.

We were able to snag a spot next to the fence barrier at the curb. Just before the parade began, I could feel the anticipation in the crowd – two weeks after the nightmarish Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, and with recent news of threats and increased police presence at Pride events nationwide, there was a sense of uncertainty of what this year’s Pride celebration would entail.

And then the parade began.

The first of the marchers made their way down the street – slowly, somberly, making no sound. There were 49 of them. Dressed in all white, wearing long skirts, feathered wings, and even pipe-cleaner halos, they held posters each bearing a picture and name of a victim killed in the Orlando shooting. With their arms outstretched, tears spilled from the eyes of every marcher and spectator. Hundreds of people lined our small section of street, but none said a word. We shared this moment of grief and loss, this reminder to stand steadfast against every hateful force that ever had the opportunity to hurt us. That feeling of unity was electrifying.

Long after the parade had ended, the 49 marchers dressed in white still marched through my mind. The feelings of hatred, fear, and the phrase “it could have been me” that had cartwheeled around inside every queer person’s brain after the shooting all resurfaced. I felt the overwhelming need to turn my grief into creation. As a writer and a storyteller, I took these feelings and created short films, wrote poetry – anything I could to break the silence left by the fear we all held in our hearts.

I’ve loved writing and creating for as long as I can remember, and where my love of storytelling and my experiences as a queer person intersect is where I feel my identity truly lies. My desire to create keeps me going, and the voices of those left behind by fear and hatred inspire me to demand that my voice is heard.

It is difficult to explain why I write and why I create without mentioning this connection to my identity. My journey of discovering who I am and what I stand for, while certainly not over, is something that is not quantifiable on the scale of a grade point average and cannot be represented by my mark in academia.

I am dedicated to telling the stories of people both like and unlike me who cannot tell stories of their own. These stories, to me, are more important than anything.