Who Am I?

   
Where is my place in the world universe? Always one of the biggest questions that goes through a teenager's mind during and after puberty. It's not an easy question to solve overnight and maybe most never find out an answer until later in life. I have always been put in a label that I felt like I never belonged in but since it was established day one it never left me. Breaking out of the image people set you in is hard to get out of then trying to prove who you really are is even harder.

     I have never really thought of how I was before middle school. Like I never noticed my personality, social status, the way I looked, how people thought of me. I do remember myself being the kid who had anger issues and would get suspended from school because I screamed, threw desks, and just ignored any rules in general. I was the bad kid who would explode any second of the day at school but was quiet and reserved at home. To this day I still don't know why from preschool to 8th grade I had to act this way and I may never know. Otherwise I was a normal kid who didn't have to really worry about anything besides homework and wondering what junk food I could eat. Besides being the bad kid, I was also known for being smart. I had a great memory when it came to tests, I could understand complex problems that other kids had problems with, and in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde case teachers would use me as an example of what a modeled student should be. I never liked when that happened because I always felt that it made people think you were a good two shoes but now that I think about it there's nothing with being recognized for doing what you're suppose to do and standing out from others who don't.

    When middle school came around, started to become more aware of how people thought of me since kids love to point out what's wrong with you if it doesn't look like what they consider "normal". I now realized that I'm a nerd for getting better grades than everybody else, if you don't look a certain way then you get rejected and get lower in the school social chain. I somehow became an over thinker. Every move I did is judged by all my peers, my body gets all awkward out of nowhere and I'm suddenly 10x shyer than what I usually am. Self conscious, over thinking, awkward, nerdy. Not a great start to establishing who I am.

     I hated making conversations with anybody in high school. I talked too fast,I stumbled over my words, I was boring. For a long time I always felt I had nothing to talk about. Never getting a chance to go to parties, experience hanging out with a group of friends. It seemed so easy for people to make friends left to right. I don;t know why it never rubbed off on me but it was so hard to make a good impression. I saw myself as invisible even though people could see me. At school I never belonged to a group, I drifted in between different groups with different social standings. It sounds good at face value. Being a chameleon who could hang with the nerds but also be cool with the jocks. But it left me feeling like I never belonged anywhere. I never spent time with anybody from school outside of it so they developed their friendships stronger while I didn't relate with any of them that well. Same with outside of school, I saw myself as the odd man out at home. No one had the same interests as me, no one was close to my age, I am one of 6 siblings. 4 younger sisters, 1 older brother. My sisters were too young for me to hang with and extremely annoying while I never really had time to spend with my older brother. In my extended family it was worse. We view ourselves as a close knit, huge family but that was where I really saw my invisibility. I never hung out with cousins because majority of them were 5 years and older and/or lived too far from me. At family functions I saw everyone greet each other and laugh and hug while I was skipped over like I wasn't there. I saw my family close but without me, everybody had somebody but not me. If it wasn't for my close friend who happened to live next door to me at that time, I probably would be a shut in or just completely give up on a social life.

     Even through all of this, I realized after I got out of school that I was well liked by basically everybody. People said I was really funny, loud, friendly,and that I was a great listener. Numerous of people came to me have to me to vent. They felt like I was trustworthy and approachable enough to discuss their problems and never have anybody else know about it. That's one thing that I always liked about me. I would listen and even provide comments to try to make them feel better or answers to what they should do in the situation they provided. I never thought I gave great advice, my over thinking would always get in the way of everything in my life. Maybe my purpose in life was to help others by just being there for them, maybe I wasn't as bad as I thought I was. I continued to be there for those who came to me to vent even until this very day. I like to check on those I haven't talked to in a long time just to see how they been. I was like a "dad" checking on his kids.

     I slowly started to notice something one sided that continued to happened: whenever I needed those same people to vent, they never seemed to have the time of day for me. I had all these problems or just things to get off my chest but I never felt as if anybody heard me. It was as if I was talking to a brick wall. I realize that nobody ever seems to check on me the same way I would do. I was that person who always had to initiate conversations in texts to those I haven't communicated in a while, I remembered birthdays and made sure to let them know while mine was forgotten, I check back on situations that happened to them and see how everything was but I dealt with situations myself. Once you see that you build one sided relationships like that, you kind of remove yourself and stop making efforts. You thought you built something with people but you can't even get a "how are you doing?" Despite this, I still check on people sometimes. I've learned that you shouldn't expect to get something in return every time you do something nice.

   

Construction Zone Ahead, DETOUR ---->

View life as a road. There are times when it has freshly placed concrete that makes the ride smooth and relaxing. Along the road, there are times when the ride gets a little bumpy with some roadkill in the way or loose gravel or a pothole or two. And, of course, there are times when the road gets way out of control when big chunks of road missing, making you constantly swerving. Even heavy snow, ice, and sleet can happen to make things even worse. When on a road, you can decide to turn left, right, make u-turns,  wait under a stoplight, and go 80mph in certain places. Ultimately, you have the sense of control, it's you and the open road and no matter what's on it, nothing can stop you from going where you want to go. Well, sorry to bust your bubble but there's something that can force you to find another way to your destination: construction zone.

We've all been in one at least once or twice in our life. We see a guy or girl in one of those bright greenish-yellow or orange vests holding that turnable sign that has slow on one side and stop on the other. You always see that the workers are working on something but every time you pass through it looks like nothing changed from the last time. What makes matter worse is that it lasts for what seems like years! I see no change in that area but whatever it is my grandkids are stopped by the same workers years afterwards. Everybody hates waiting. Whoever does must be an old person with way too much times on their hands to even give a crap. I wish I had patience just like those kinds of old people but I won't be old until at least 30 years from now so I'll just wait then. But those construction projects that is especially annoying are the ones where you have to follow a bunch of detour signs just to get back to where you were going. The detour makes a 5 minute trip into an hour and 15min trip that takes you to sketchy neighborhoods or spooky woods where you swear monsters like Freddy Krueger and that Ring girl go to have camping trips. This is your life throwing you a curveball that takes you off course from your original plan.

For me, I thought my road would be a little rocky but for the most part smooth and controllable. That didn't work out which is evidenced by this post's whole point. I spent all of high school as that guy who everybody liked and thought was funny but I never really fit into any groups. I definitely wasn't athletic so those sports groups wasn't up for debate. I made good grades but the nerdy groups would get wilder than a party at Charlie Sheen's house. I couldn't even fit in with the loner kids because where way too loner for me. Not to mention at home I lived with 3 teenaged girl, a boy that was 5 years younger than me, and three adults with two of those over the age of 50. With my extended family, I was born into that weird gap where I had like two cousins the same age as me but lived too far to hang with and everybody else was either preteen girls or 7 years older than I was. To make a long story short, I felt like I didn't fit anywhere.

Detour #1: Main road to finding a group of people who I could fit in with has detoured me to the desert of I Fit In Better with A Group of Balloons Than Actual People. I'm pretty sure that desert is in the middle of New Mexico.

So, when it came time to graduate from high school, this guy would have rather fart in the principal's face and flipped off the school towards the sunset than to sit during my graduation but somehow I made it through. I decided that I needed a big change to get things going for me. Instead of being the introverted, scared to talk to strangers and babies kid I've always been, I wanted to become a social butterfly that had too many friends to count and went to parties and other stuff stereotypical teenagers did. My first day of college was horrifying! I'm 2 hours away from home, I'm like 4 counties over, and worst of all: I FORGOT HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS!!!!! How in the crap do you do that? Like, I really needed a manual, help form Stephen Hawkins, and one of those Friendships for Dummies books. The struggle was that real. I mean, I made new friends before of course. It's just that this time I didn't have my old friends to fall on. I was in a new town that had nobody I knew.

It's hard for an introverted person to suddenly become outgoing out of nowhere. I'm not going to be all happy and randomly go to a random person and strike up a convo when I've actively avoided anybody who I didn't live with for the first 2 decades of my life. Not gonna happen. So it was kinda rough the first couple of months. I just woke up, went to class, grabbed something to eat, and went straight to my dorm room to watch tv. I was even in a learning community of campus where we all had the same majors but even then I never really made an effort to get to know them. I had plenty of opportunities to do so but once again, my introvetedness slapped me in my face and told me to get lost. Veeerrry uneventful college experience right off the bat.

Detour #2: Main road to trying to become the complete opposite of me has detoured me to the swamp of The Lone Alligator Who Drinks Nothing But 4 Bottles of Sierra Mist Everyday. Just a black skinned alligator ruining his kidneys and watching cartoons all day.

Things final changed when I needed a ride to get to a haunted trail that my learning community did every year around Halloween. I didn't have a car but I lucked up when a girl I occasionally talked to in the halls of my dorm saw me and offered a ride. I gladly accepted and then a friendship happened between me, her, and the guy in the backseat at the time. From then on, their connection lead me to make even more friends who became the group I would always hang out with and became my "sisters" and "brothers".

Detour #3: My previous detour that lead me to The Lone Alligator Swamp lead me back onto the main road of finding a group of people that I fit in with. I even had an identity within our group which was being the Token Black Guy which I've always been so it didn't bother me. Black people questions would arise every now and then but it's expected with the Token Black Guy.

Everything seemed to be going great for me. I made more connections with other people, not as strong as I wanted them to be but it was better than what it was before. I even joined a couple of clubs I liked and in one I was steadily climbing the ladder to being President. Everything went crumbling down the summer before my junior year. The worst detour I've encountered so far: the sea of Being Forced Out Of College. DUN DUN DUUUUUN!!!

TO BE CONTINUED