Take a seat, I’ve got a story to tell. So it’s fourth quarter of seventh grade, my family and I have just returned to Kansas from; let’s just call it a rather disappointing family endeavor. I’m starting seventh grade at new school. Even with everything that’s happened, I just look at the whole situation as a chance to start new. When I was at school—prior to our family crisis— I wasn’t like scary weird, but I didn’t fit in. I got around with a tight knit group of friends of fellow weirdo’s and that was it. Aside from that I wasn’t comfortable with anybody else, and I don’t really think people were comfortable with me.

The moment I stepped out of my mom’s car and looked at my new junior high school, I knew that was my chance to start anew. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t like I was desperate to fit in, just to change the vibe I gave off to people. In a way, I wanted to be the kid that I had always wished I was friends with; that was the goal essentially. I eventually fell into a group of people that I was fond of, I met Paul Grieco who was assigned by the counselors to show me the school and how things worked there. We bonded a bit and we stuck together, and I got ‘blessed’ into his group of friends and it went like that for the last month or so of my seventh grade year.

Eighth grade, I still felt as if I was new at the school, and I started meeting and talking to more people and I eventually found myself socially embedded with the stoners. I liked their attitude I guess; the attitude of “I am who I am and ‘screw’ anybody that doesn’t like that” and surprisingly enough, I’ve found that the stoners are the most accepting group of people you’ll find, even more accepting than the social ‘rejects’. From then, I decided that I was going to be who I wanted to be, weird or not. I was going to do and talk to who I wanted, regardless of some status quo that I wasn’t— and have never really been— privy to. That’s when things in my life started to get ‘interesting’ I’d say. 8-10 grade, I’m not going to get into the specifics of, but let’s just say I found myself and a lot of situations that I never thought I’d be in, doing, seeing, and hearing of things that would have flabbergasted me years before, and not in the good way, and that’s putting it lightly.

The experiences I’ll admit; changed me, and in hindsight I’m not sure if it was for the better. I started to see life in a grotesquely pessimistic way— heck, and I still haven’t really dropped that bit completely. Things were always hopeless, so I started living 90 percent of my life ‘in the moment.” I had my place in the social side of life and, in that aspect I was satisfied, but I felt out of place, anxious for no reason. I had, by all means, become the ‘social butterfly’ I had always wanted to be. I had gathered the life experience I thought I needed at the time, yet I wasn’t right, I didn’t feel like.

Then another ‘predicament’ came up, and again we had to move. Majority of my summer was spent in preparation of moving into my deceased grandmother’s  house— a different story for a different time— the place I currently call home. Life had given me yet another chance to start fresh.

Upon entering Blue Valley Southwest for the first time, I immediately felt the difference, in just about everything. People here are different— some not in a good way— their vibe is off, basically everything is different. No narcissism intended, but I found it amusing to see people be so sheltered, I guess. The way Blue Valley and Johnson County would describe fear, is substantially different from how the rest of the world would describe it, I’m not speaking down on this place though, it’s not bad, it’s just different. And that difference is what finally allowed me to ‘tone it down’ and look at the full picture—or at least what I perceive to be the full picture, now— and I realized, that I was way off track from the person I wanted to be, and that I didn’t need all of those ‘experiences’ to be the person I wanted to be, to ‘find myself’.

No, what I discovered was that the person I wanted to be—as cliché is this is going to sound— is the person I was all those years ago, I’m still that weird kid I used to be. Somewhere along the road I finally accepted myself, and if I had realized that my 8th grade year, I might have saved myself some heartache. Though I can’t do anything about the past, I realize it now, and I’m a lot happier because of it. And even when I’m not happy, I’m content with myself, a hard feeling to describe, but I’ve found peace in it.

Turns out, I’ve been the person I’ve always wanted to be friends with this whole time (narcissism intended). You can take what you’d like out of this, I wasn’t trying to teach anybody a lesson about anything. It’s just a story; my story. And this is just the beginning…