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To All The People Who Don’t Fit In

Dear everybody who feels like they will never find their people,

Been there, done that. I was that person that everybody recognizes but can’t be bothered to say hi to. A lot of people knew me, but didn’t “know” me. I had friends, but I was never anybody’s “go-to” friend. I was always the last one invited anywhere, if I ever wanted a social interaction I would be the one asking. I spent the majority of my time by myself, looking at Snapchat stories of people having fun with other people, or scrolling through Instagram videos of cute couples or friend groups have VSCO moments. I would always be yearning to have even one amazing, carefree experience like that, without fear of repercussions. 

And I’m here to tell you, you will find your people. You will find the people you never want to leave, the people who never want to leave you. It may not be right now, it may not be in the near future, but it will happen. Maybe it is some people in your Dungeons and Dragons online forum. Maybe it’s somebody you constantly see at that one really random coffee shop. As long as it is people that love you for who you are, flaws and all, it doesn’t matter how you meet, or what you are like. It matters that they are your people, your ride or die, your “I’ll help you bury the body” people. Even if you feel utterly alone right now, or utterly overwhelmed or anxious or afraid, remember that your people are out there. All you have to do is give it a chance. 

Just take a breath, and say hello. You never know who you will meet, but you do know that one day, that hello will turn into something much more, and eventually, you’ll look around and find yourself surrounded by people you love, who genuinely care about you, who want to have those crazy nights and legendary parties, or want to just sit around, sipping tea and reading books, or doing whatever the h*ck you want. Although it may seem impossible, there are people who in a few months or years, you won’t be able to imagine your life without. You just have to trust that they are out there, and you will find each other. So, breathe, and it will happen. You will get there.

Sincerely,

A former nobody, a former “kinda” friend, a former weirdo

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Advice For High School Freshmen

Please. If you are either about to be a high school freshman or are one, please read this and take it to heart. Advice is from somebody who know what they are talking about.

1. If you don’t have a solid group of friends before high school, make some. Please. This makes the transition so much easier, and it is so helpful to have someone to rely on no matter what.

2. That being said, don’t be afraid to meet new people. You will meet people, and you will probably see your friend group change. Embrace this, it’s ok.

3. You don’t have to be friends with everybody. Having two or three close friends is so much better than having 20+ kinda friends.

4. It is good knowing people in high places. 

5. (In response to 4) Join an activity of some sort. It could be a sport, music, drama, debate, volunteering, anything, just join something that makes you happy and you look forward to. It may make your life busy, but it makes everything that much better.

6. Try to start figuring your life out. By that, I mean know if you want to go into science, art, math whatever, and start to base your classes around that. Know what requirements you need to graduate, or if you need a certain class to get into most colleges. For example, know if you need a foreign language to get into college.

7. If there are any required electives you need to graduate, try to do them freshman year. If you need a public speaking elective, do it now, so that you don’t have to take it senior year after you forget.

8. Don’t do your homework on your bed. Get a desk, do it in your kitchen, I don’t care, just don’t do it on your bed. You will fall asleep.

9. Get a morning routine and keep it. If you time everything, you will never be late.

10. Homecoming and prom are overrated. Still go, but accept this early on.

11. Sleep. Please. Shoot for 7 hours a night, but no less than 6. Especially if you are an athlete.

12. Get out sometimes. Have fun with your friends. Go to that football game, even if you don’t like football. It’s ok to have a social life.

13. Take. Notes. Please. Figure out your method now, whether online, bullet points, paragraph whatever. Figure it out.

14. Your grades do not define you. It’s ok to get a C. It’s ok if you don’t have a 4.0. Life will move on, it will get better.

15. Freshman year sucks. You can’t drive, you are the lowest of the low, you are still dependent on your parents. Accept this. Each year after this will be better than the last. I promise.

16. Upperclassmen aren’t as scary as they seem.They are just like you-sticking to their friend groups, not wanting to be bothered. If you are in an activity with upperclassmen, please meet them, say high to them, interact. They are good people to know.

17. Enjoy it. You are in high school. This may seem like the longest four years of your life, but they will be over before you know it. You will regret not going to that one game, or that one dance, or that one party. So, go do it. Try the sport you want to. Learn that one language. Take that one really weird class. Hang out with friends, go to that party. You will not regret living your life.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

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Isn’t this like the entire premise of Willy Wonka?

A small crew of squirrels could sweep a kitchen with their bushy tails if they had better work ethics and stopped fucking around all the time.

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But why is this actually me right now

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Like, I mean, you’re not wrong.

Chances are that at some point in your life you snapped your fingers right as someone died

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Is it just me or is the eye doctor (optometrist) the “fun” doctor?

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Who are William and Ellen Craft?

Oh boy, here we go.  One of my all-time favorite stories.  William and Ellen Craft were both born into slavery in Georgia in the 1820s.  They looked like this.  You’ll note, just by looking at her, that Ellen was very light skinned.  That would be because her parents were an enslaved woman and her master…and Ellen’s mother was also the child of an enslaved woman and her master.  You can only imagine what had happened.  Slavery is disgusting.  Anyway.

William and Ellen met, fell in love, and got married so far as they were allowed (enslaved people were forbidden by law to actually get married in any legally binding fashion; since being sold away from each other forever happened so often, slave marriage vows often included the phrase “til death or separation do you part”–again, slavery is disgusting).  As you can imagine, William and Ellen didn’t want to have any children born into the system of slavery.  In December of 1848, they decided to escape to the North.  And that’s when the Crafts got crafty and came up with a brilliant plan to escape in style.

As we established, Ellen was white passing, and they decided to use this fact to their advantage.  William was able to keep a small portion of his earnings from being contracted out as a carpenter, and he saved up that money to buy Ellen some really fancy clothes.  Once disguised, Ellen looked like this:

Dashing, right?  So Ellen was disguised as a wealthy, white man, someone nobody would think to question, and William would be playing the part of her enslaved manservant.  Their story was that they were traveling north because Ellen was in poor health and wanted the expertise of northern doctors.  This poor health story was for a few different reasons:

Ellen had been practicing masculine mannerisms and behaviors, but by claiming to be sick, she wouldn’t have to talk much and reveal that she still had a feminine voice.

Ellen had her right arm in a sling, pretending it was badly injured, so she could mark travel documents with an “X” and hide that she didn’t know how to write.

On racially segregated trains, she could keep William in the “white” compartments with her because she would need him to tend to her at all times, what with her “delicate health” and all.  Staying together would prevent the two from getting separated accidentally.

It was still a nerve-wracking experience, to be sure, with the threat of discovery at every turn, but William and Ellen Craft managed to escape from slavery by riding first class trains and staying in the nicest hotels along the way.  There was even one point where Ellen got to have dinner with the captain of the steamboat they were riding.  They arrived in Philadelphia, safe and sound, on Christmas Day, 1848.  The Crafts then settled in Boston, fitting in nicely with the free black community in the Beacon Hill neighborhood and making friends with prominent abolitionists.  These abolitionist friends, which included the likes of Theodore Parker and Lewis Hayden among many others, encouraged William and Ellen to make their escape story public.  They did, and soon the two were celebrities.

Their celebrity status turned out to not be such a good thing less than two years later, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed.  Their master back in Georgia had, of course, read all about how the Crafts outwitted all the white people and made a home for themselves in Boston, so he hired two slave catchers to go up to Boston and retrieve his “property.”  What the slave catchers didn’t bargain for was that Boston was ready for them.

Up in Boston, the Vigilance Committee consisting of both black and white abolitionists was hard at work coming up with a plan to prevent the Crafts from being captured.  William Craft and Theodore Parker even thought of legal loopholes to get William arrested in Massachusetts, if it came to that, because he couldn’t be taken out of Massachusetts jail to be taken South.  Loophole 1: since Ellen and William still hadn’t gotten married, a friend could report William for fornication and get him arrested for that.  Loophole 2: William could carry various weapons on him, fight back against the slave catchers if they caught him, and get arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.  They thought of everything.

When the slave catchers arrived, the Vigilance Committee sprang into action, getting the two slave catchers arrested like six separate times in quick succession, for petty crimes both real and imagined.  They had Vigilance Committee member Samuel Gridley Howe doing his Sam thing and making very scary threats.  All of this was done to make these slave catchers so sick of Boston that they’d give up and go home to Georgia.  All the while, William and Ellen were being shuffled, often separately, between safe houses.  Eventually it came to pass that Ellen was staying with Theodore Parker, while William stayed with Lewis Hayden.  And that’s when yet another dramatic episode happened.

Lewis Hayden had himself been born into slavery in Kentucky, and he had made his escape up to Boston just a couple years before William and Ellen Craft did.  Once William got to his house, Hayden put his own plan into action.  One day, the slave catchers, who had already been put through hell by like the entire city of Boston, arrived at Lewis Hayden’s doorstep and demanded that he turn over the fugitive William Craft.  Hayden calmly opened the door a little further, not to let them inside, but to reveal the two kegs of gunpowder he had waiting just inside.  He told them that he would prefer to blow them all sky high if they took one more step, rather than see himself or William Craft return to slavery.  The two slave catchers took the hint and left.

William and Ellen were reunited at Theodore Parker’s house shortly thereafter, and plans were made to smuggle the Crafts up to Canada and then across the Atlantic to England.  Before they left, however, there was something Parker wanted to do for them.  Since they were heading to safety at last and no longer needed to be able to go to jail for fornication, Parker offered to legally marry them.  William and Ellen agreed, and Parker, their minister, did the honors right in his own living room, with a Bible in one hand and–I’m not kidding–a sword in the other.  Parker escorted them as far as Maine himself, with a variety of swords and guns on his person so he was basically that trope where a character takes an absurd amount of weapons out of their clothes.  When they parted, he gave William and Ellen the Bible and sword he had been holding as he officiated their marriage.

William and Ellen made a home for themselves in England for the next nineteen years.  They got to go to school, and they fulfilled their goal of raising their children in freedom.  They had five children, as a matter of fact.  In 1859, they were paid a visit by their old friend, Theodore Parker, who got to meet their children and see that they still had the Bible he gave them.  Parker was on his way to Italy, where he hoped the warm climate would improve his tuberculosis, but he would die in Florence the following spring, at just 49 years of age.  After the Civil War, Ellen was miraculously able to figure out where her mother was in Georgia and have her brought over to England to stay with them.  They hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years, so you can only imagine the reunion.  In 1868, once slavery was abolished, citizenship was granted to African Americans, and the right to vote was granted to African American men, the Crafts felt like they had work to do.  Twenty years after they escaped from it, William and Ellen moved back to Georgia, back to where they began.  William and Ellen tried to establish a school for freedmen as well as a farm, but white supremacist violence and laws led to the failure of both after Reconstruction ended.

William and Ellen Craft spent their twilight years living in Charleston, South Carolina with their daughter and son-in-law.  Ellen Craft died in 1891, at the age of 65.  William Craft died in 1900, at the age of 75.

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Things I’ve Heard In My American Public High School Today #2

1. Spring is either summer, winter, or bad.

2. Hi Sorry, I’m dad.

3. Are you jealous of my friendship bracelet?

4. (Person 1) You mean, I have to come in during a study hall I don’t have, on a day I’m not here, to do a test over content I wasn’t present for, that nobody told me existed?

    (Person 2) Yep.

5. Did you just die?

6. Hey! Tell him the one about the pile! That’s second!

7. If I get this wrong, I’m going to die. (Gets it wrong) Well then.

8. Would it be sympathize or empathize?

10. (Person 1) Are you just done with life?

      (Person 2) (Groans)

11. (Teacher) Hey, you’re friends with (insert name)

      (Kid) Yeah, they’re great.

      (Teacher) Yeah, they’re really smart.

      (Kid) Well, sometimes.

(Person they were talking about) Hey! Gimme a high five!

12. (In French class) (Person 1) Bonjour, comment ca va?

                                  (Person 2) What? Hi.

13. Y’all,I just found a Pilot G-2 07 pen in the hallway up for grabs. It’s gonna be a good day.

14. This is hard because you have to sound like you don’t want to die when you actually really want to.

15. So, how many houses do you have again?

16.(Singing the theme song to “Spongebob Squarepants”)

Just a reminder that I go to a fairly upper-middle class school,with many very wealthy kids attending. Also, all of the classes I am taking are advanced, honors or AP. So, this is the part of the high school that is being represented in these quotes.

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I thought some people would appreciate this picture of my dog.

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My Philosophical Question Of The Day

Ok. I have these way too often, and I’m sorry in advance if I make your brain explode. Please don’t sue me.

Why are there so many more cases of anxiety and depression now than thirty years ago? Is it because this current generation simply has more cases, or is it because it used to be taboo to have these illnesses? I mean, depression is a serotonin imbalance, so it has been around for as long of humans have been feeling happy. So, why?

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Y’all

I was looking up Centuries by Fall Out Boy (for a different lyric, but whatever) and on the Google lyrics, I learned that we have been singing a key lyric wrong forever.

Guys. It’s not “heavy metal broke my DOO DOO heart”

Y’all. It’s “heavy metal ROCK my doo doo heart”

Guys. Y’all.

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Japanese high school recreation of the Pixar intro..

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Another School Story

Today in a class I started reviewing stuff for a biology test (not a final, just a test) and after about ten minutes I got up, calmly grabbed my phone and water bottle, and sat in the corner in the fetal position. A few minutes later, the substitute teacher of the class I was in came over, where we then had the following dialogue.

Teacher: Looks like you’re having fun over here.

Me: Yeah I started reviewing for bio.

Teacher: Yeah, I feel you.

Me: I’ll be fine in a couple minutes.

Teacher: Biology is one of the hardest courses you will ever take.

Me: Thanks.

And then the teacher left me alone. And, just like I said, a few minutes later I sat up, grabbed my water bottle and phone, and walked calmly back to my desk. Then, I started writing this post.

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Finals Week Breakdown

Nearly screamed while reviewing for my physics final in class, but instead I kicked the desk and ran back over to the lab tables where I hid for 12 minutes. My friend had to come get me. It was a time.

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What Anxiety Is Really Like

(From someone with a severe anxiety disorder for 5.5 years)\

So, anxiety is like a war, if you ask me. A war with three sides and multiple alliances between said sides. Here are our players.

1. Rational Me. This is the part if my brain that says “It’s just a test” or “It’s just an appointment, you’ll be fine. Don’t freak out”. Sadly, this side rarely ever wins.

2. Monkey Brain Me. This is the monkey part of your brain speaking. The stupid, stupid monkey. This part hardly ever chills the f out. This brain is screaming “DANGERDANGERDANGERDANGER ABORT MISSION FIGHT OR FLIGHT”. This side occasionally wins, or at least, more than Rational Me

3. Anxiety Me. This side usually reigns victorious. It most often fights with Rational Me, and it is the voice that screams “BUT WHAT IF... THEN THIS... THEN THAT... THEN YOU DIE”. I don’t like this side/

Now, for alliances.

1. Monkey and Anxiety. This is the usual alliance, and happens a lot, and they often win.

2. Rational and Anxiety. Rare, never happens. Never. 

3. Money and Rational. I have never witnessed this alliance.

These sides fight very often. Typically, it is Monkey and Anxiety vs. Rational, and it is pretty 50/50 as to who is going to win. Rarely, if ever, it is Rational and Anxiety vs. Monkey, Anxiety saying “what if we run away” and Rational saying “sweetheart you are fine.” 

When wars happen, it is what common people see as anxiety and panic attacks. And wars happen all the time. Medication can usually dull the powers of one or two sides, and helps Rational Me win. That is why many people take it.

All in all, if I can write this much about a metaphor about what anxiety is, I think it is safe to say that clinical anxiety exists. If you ever tell me that you don’t believe anxiety exists, I will try to gently correct you, and if that doesn’t work, I will destroy you with facts and anecdotes. ANXIETY DOES EXIST.

If you read all of this, good job. Go get a cookie.

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A Thought

Imagine, teleportation exists. However, it takes anywhere from 45 minutes to a day to take you to where you want to go. That’s pretty great, right? Problem is, you have to sit in the teleportation machine until it finishes doing the thing. Sometimes, you can get out periodically and walk around, get food, etc. if you don’t get to get out, someone brings you food and drink inside, and there’s a bathroom. Sounds pretty snazzy, right? We can teleport anywhere we want, within a day of when we leave.

Go back and reread that. What is I told you this magical teleportation machine exists? Guess what. It does. It’s an airplane. I just talked about a flight.

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Just Some Thoughts About Glasses/Contacts

So, I’m going to restate the obvious.

Some superhero-esque people can wake up in the morning and just. See. They don’t have to go through the pain of putting in contacts, or the horror of not finding glasses. They can just see. AND THEY DONT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT. They can see for free.

However, if you want to get deep, we can discuss an interesting topic: glasses and identity. I don’t know about most other blind people, but I feel as if my blindness is closely tied to my identity, and that I wouldn’t be myself without them. So...

What would I be like without glasses and contacts? Would I be a totally different person? I got my glasses in elementary school, when personality is fully developing. Did they affect that? Would I hang out with different people if I didn’t have glasses? Would my interests be different? Would my successes be different?

But, guess what. I will never know. Forever (or until I get LASIK) I will be blind. And I will be the current version of myself. Forever.

Anyway, go ponder that for a while. Don’t break your brain. That’s a lot of paperwork on my part. Have fun.