Different

Throughout my life, I have always been an extremely curious person. What is the importance of life? Why does no one care about me? What is true happiness? All of them running through my mind constantly. As if a storm was constantly circling and moving around my thoughts. Everyday feeling as though it is a whirlpool of thoughts surrounding me. Many of these questions made me think deeper. Every question causing me to start doubting myself. Almost every person around me getting tired of my racing inquiring, mind. The weird concept that there has always been one question that keeps rushing back to me. Why am I so different?

When I was in elementary school I did not have many friends, and the people I did hang out with were not really my true friends. They were flakes more than anything. They were the “London, England’s Soul Suckers,” that had the faces of my friends. Taking away the only confidence that I did have in myself. The question of why am I not good enough? Filtering through my mind over again as if it was on a loop. Then I ended up transferring schools when I was in fifth grade, from Carey Elementary to Bellevue Elementary. That year was the year I actually met my first real friend, but the question kept coming back to me. Why am I so different? Everyone around me had friends and I didn’t. Everyone was laughing about jokes that I understood but didn’t think were funny. Everything I did was just different. I was seen as shy for the most part. The girl who was always alone in the corner listening to music. The one most people did not talk to unless they had to.

When I entered middle school everything just got worse. At school, everyone’s life seemed perfectly fine, but mine was falling apart. Sixth grade was the year one of my friends passed away from a snowmobile accident. I became depressed and my anxiety intensified. I felt very alone because everyone around me at school acted as though everything was superb. Why was everyone else so perfect and I was just so broken? I felt as if I was a jigsaw puzzle with multiple pieces missing from it, or a bottle that was thrown onto the ground and shattered. The questions kept coming to my mind, the same ones over and over again. The rest of middle school was the same as it began. The longer and longer I was in there, I kept wondering why I was so different. I was not like the other kids around me and I never understood why.

After a few years, I finally moved up to high school, I still had the same pressing question entering my mind. This is when I started writing all of my thoughts down into short creative stories. I began to become more open to the people around me, telling them about me and my story. After a while, the weight that was on my shoulders prior to telling people about me was slowly becoming lighter. I started writing more and more, but I still was struggling to talk to people. Eventually, after having people read my stories, I decided to take a shot at talking to people and sharing how I truly feel. My writing grew stronger and stronger. When I told my story I was not just helping myself I was helping all the people around me that wanted to listen. That is why I continued talking to people and sharing my experiences. The more I shared the sooner, I grasped the concept that people do not like telling others about themselves. That only pushed me harder to share mine.

Last year, I realized why people are afraid or do not want to talk to others about themselves. I know the feeling deep down inside of feeling as though you don’t matter. You are not alone, when you look into your friend’s eyes and see that they do not actually care. The feeling of being alone, not having anyone to talk to. That’s one of the worst feelings that you can have growing up. That year I was the one who ended up getting bullied and harassed for being one of only a few people in my high school to talk about mental health. I was not scared of the people around me for judging me for being who I am. I wanted people to understand and to find the answers to the constant questions flowing through my head.

To this day I still believe everyone is different but no one in this world is ever alone. When you are alone you believe as though you can not talk about how you truly feel inside. The wall between your true feelings and the mask you have to put on in order to show the people around you that you are okay. Every life is unique and the stories that come with them. At some point in everyone's life, we all have that one pressing question: "Why am I different?" The people in this world are all uniquely different but so similar. We all have the same questions that pop into our minds at different times, that push us to think deeper about life and the people around us. We all have times that we end up feeling alone and misunderstood by the people around us. It unfortunately just happens to be a cruel fact of life. We always have this question popping up in our minds but know you are never truly alone. I have always wondered why people do not just accept each other for who they truly are. There does not have to be such a big stigma on mental health if we just talked more about it and allowed people to be ok with how they truly feel inside. We as humans are all different.