Like a flower withering away from the sun’s absence, my past of seclusion stripped my spirit for years. The numbing memories I have of a lonely past bewilder me, and although I’d love to clear the sinking into the depths of the ocean, all I can do today is thank the experience for happening.
I began to drown as a third grader eight years ago. Although much of it was foreign to my innocent brain, the profound basics in my head wavered like repeating the alphabet within my mind. My parents were fighting. Also, I attended a minuscule Christian private school with twenty students in the third-grade class. Eight of us were girls, which provided a high competition for popularity. I, because of all that I had occurring at my home, was always shy. Consequently, their obsession with competition caused me to morph into an outsider. However, competition in a life already filled with argument paralleled chaos at a young age and I wilted into the looming silence instead of conforming to arguments about who would act as the best “fairy” in pretend games played at recess.
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My soul began to weaken, my interests were lost, and I felt alone at school. The haunting statement “You never make sense, Leah!” made by those girls constantly caused me to become careful about what I said to them, and then eventually zap my beliefs and accept the brainwashing.
Then, an epiphany hit; I realized that instead of waiting for approval, I could control my own life at that single moment, ending my want for acceptance by others. Although seemingly an amazing realization on the surface, it initiated an obsession for control in a world where I felt I had none.
I began to seek control at a new public middle school by spending countless hours perfecting my homework, running until immense pain hit, and starving myself to create this ideal image I thought I needed to have recognition. I became obsessed with perfection. Of course, I was never upset over this perfection and felt joy from it. But as the quote by Hugh Prather states, “Perfectionism is a slow death.”
I was getting exceptional grades, eating healthy, and exercising on the outside, but inwardly I was trying to seek acceptance of what happened at that private school and in my life still. At my new school, acceptance came through the kind person I became out of understanding seclusion, but my shyness persisted. friends that understood me at last, yet my shyness and obsessions still reigned until at last they were recognized by my parents.
My parents did eventually separate, and I now live with my father. To this day, I still have my shyness because of feeling that what I say has insignificance just as those girls said. Slowly, I am being rescued from that ocean I sank in, and am learning about what happened to me. Through this awareness, I have gained a great understanding of the world, and am no longer that girl who feels like she does not have a voice. Although still shy, my experience has strengthened me, and I no longer feel like I need acceptance by those girls any longer, for I have loving parents and friends who care about me, and great dreams due to newfound interests. So, I will forever thank my experience of being an outsider, for it has built me into the self-aware, disciplined, and understanding human I am today.
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