DISCLAIMER: THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AS ONE OF MY COLLEGE ADMITTANCE ESSAYS AND HAS BEEN REWORKED TO FIT THE BLOG'S VOICE.
In the second grade, I attended Benjamin Franklin Elementary School East Campus in Mesa, Arizona, pictured below.
Beautiful. I know.
Since then, not much has changed. I'm still in the same town with the same kids with the same names who live in the same houses and carry the same sack lunches with the same goldfish crackers and sandwiches and cute notes from their moms. The funny thing is, I don't care for the sameness of this city with its kids and their goldfish crackers and their mom notes.
(I have nothing against goldfish crackers. It's just part of the imagery. Move on.)
Second grade is the first time I remember realizing, however faintly, how much I sincerely disliked the "sameness" of everything around me. Mrs. Aradondo was the name of my teacher. She seemed pretty okay to me at the time (or maybe I just liked her because she had a bunny. That was probably it.) I rather enjoyed her company until one day, I ended up with the wrong phonics worksheet. Instead of sending me home with the correct worksheet like a rational person because it wasn't my fault that I had the wrong one, she kept me in at recess. When I say she kept me in at recess I mean that she made me sit in the breezeway outside of room 26 where I could watch all of the other kids playing. As I sat with puffy red eyes, watching the other kids play while I cried melodramatically over my worksheet, I watched the girls with curled blonde hair, blue eyes, and white sneakers laugh and play. Self consciously, I looked down at my own pink and black sneakers, felt my own brown hair smoothed back into its tight ponytail and thought about my green eyes and freckles. I was different.
I was different. But I was goddamn adorable. That's for sure.
Looking back now, I realize that my emotions could not have been nearly as deep as I recall. But I wish that I could wrap my arms around my tiny, freckled, second-grade self and tell her that the ultimate "sameness" of everything around her was safe for now, that eventually she would see that "sameness" is/was not part of who she would grow to become.
That little girl in my past has become such a large part of who I am today. Physically, I am no longer wearing pink and black sneakers, and my freckles are, for the most part, gone. I've turned out to be a rather attractive person by all accounts of the the word.
I mean LOOK AT THAT BEAUTY.
But emotionally, mentally, religiously, and morally, I am different than the sameness that surrounds me. There are still days when I feel afraid of being the black sheep in a community of white sheep who avoid my company, and some days it takes everything I have to get out of bed and face the people who have made the past 4 years of my life pretty miserable. But I have come to realize that while sameness is safe for now, I have bigger, more exciting things waiting for me and my differences.
Mentally I am still stuck in the second grade.
And that is an okay thing to be.
