Part I
All That I Am
Silent. I tend not to say a word when I need to be loudest. We are children when I'm recruited into a neighborhood club. The other girls are bigger, older and they scare me, but I stay because I don't want to be rude, don't want to get on their bad side. I don't really know them, but they know each other. When the one who started it all says, "And there's no girls named 'Naminé' allowed," the other girls laugh. I know Naminé. We had met before and played together. She's sweet, and gentle, and kind. But when everyone else agrees with this older girl, I don't have the courage to speak out against her. Or to even ask, "Why?"
Vulnerable. I open myself up for ridicule, to be hated. It's the first day of fourth grade, and I am dangerously shy. My only other friends wound up in different classes. I don't talk much, but I know my stuff, and I follow the teacher easily as she teaches. The only time I speak is to answer her questions. At recess I'm approached by people who ask me about myself, people who are trying to be friends. I give short answers because I don't know what to say; I've never enjoyed talking about myself. But I try not to shrink away – I keep my head up, back straight, and shoulders back just like, as I'm told, confident people do. Yet my answers are still restricted. The other kids begin to think that I'm stuck-up, that I believe I'm better than them. I know I'm not. By the end of the year, I'm left with little to no sense of my self-worth.
Cowardly. I detest confrontation. I am in middle school, and I have written an anonymous note to the guy that I like. We've both liked each before, in the second grade. But that was such a long time ago. I made it anonymous for a reason. I can't even face him long enough to give it to him myself, so I send my best friend on an errand to do it for me. She has other friends with her, and I ask them not to go, but it's out of my control. Minutes pass by, and I'm waiting at the end of the hall. I can see him and a couple of his friends. He's holding the note, reading it as he walks. The hall is completely empty, and I can feel my stomach doing flips. They're still halfway down the hall when his friend says "Hey, there she is!" Confusion doesn't last long before I'm heading out the nearest door. It's the next day, and my friend said that one of the girls that went with her gave a very obvious hint that it was me. He won't look at me. Where we were laughing two days earlier, he mocks me for every little thing, and he's curt. I withdraw into myself, doing nothing to provoke his teasing. Our friendship never rebounds.
Inept. I can never figure out how to cheer up those closest to me. My friend tells me all about how he's been feeling unwanted by everyone around him. It's his recent breakup that sticks out in his mind when I ask him why he feels that way. He explains how he worked so hard to make her and even her family happy, to make sure they had a Christmas. He tells me that he found out she had been cheating on him for the entirety of the five months they had been together, and that she started dating one of his best friends three days after dumping him. I have no words to comfort him, no words to tell him how much I care about him for fear of sounding obsessively infatuated. It's pathetic and selfish. I know it's not much, but all I can really say is, "I'm sorry," and I find it's for more reasons than he knows.
Weak. I am hurt, to the point of tears, when I am the one breaking the promise. It's my friend's eighteenth birthday, and I've spent the whole day with her at someone else's house. I planned her party, and she loved it. It's a small gathering of only four, but we have fun anyway. Another friend calls me and asks if I'm free – his mother had canceled plans they'd made…again. Over the phone I can tell how distressed he is. I ask the only one of us who can drive if he can take me to this friend's house, since all we are doing now is watching videos; we've very clearly run out of things to do. He agrees. Over the phone, I tell an already upset friend that we're leaving now, as I hang up. After all, my friend who's driving just said that we would. But here we are, ten minutes later, and we still haven't left. I'd felt like I'd given him my word. And he hates broken promises.
These are only a few of my most defining personality quirks. I wish I could say that I'm proud to be who I am, but taking everything into consideration… I just know I could do better, be better. I just don't know where to begin. Is it like this for everybody? I know people change every day, and I so want to. But how do you take such a desire and turn it into a conscious effort? How are you supposed to react differently in a situation than you normally would, to make a split second decision so unlike you that it begins to alter who you are?
Pretending to be someone you're not? You'd be living a lie.
People always say, "Don't change for anybody." But what if you can't stand who you are? What if who you are drives people away?
How do you initiate a change within yourself?