My freshman year has taught me so much. Much more than academic stuff, but more of who I am and who I want to be. At the beginning of the year I wanted to have a ton of friends but I learned that it is better to have four quarters rather than a hundred pennies. At the start of freshman year and 8th grade whenever I had a problem with someone and the way they were treating me I would say nothing because I was terrified of confrontation and I learned this year that is not a healthy thing for me and that there is a way to tell people that you need a break from them or just simply you have a problem with something they did without making them feel hurt, in a way that they don’t hate me but they are just aware of things. My goal is to have no one on my bad side but to cut toxic people out of my lives without causing unnecessary drama. I started the year with a good friend group and we would hangout but then slowly they would stop inviting me and I started to realize if I didn’t talk to some of them first in classes then we wouldn’t talk at all and that if I wasn’t the only one in that class with one on them that I didn’t matter unless I was their only “friend” in that class so I stopped sitting with them at lunch and they didn’t say a single words then I left all of the group chats and not a single person said a word except for the one person that didn’t go to that school. Obviously I was extremely hurt that no one cared and no one had ever cared but I gained a stronger relationship with my neighbor who was my best friend last year and now we are closer than ever and I have a really strong small group of friends and I actually feel like they care about me. Them making me feel not cared about has taught me how to be a actual good friend which is very important because I have this friend that I have been friends with since we were toddlers and right now she is in a really dark place with friends and is constantly feeling left out, the other day I was on a walk with two of my friends and who happened to be friends with her too and we passed her on our walk, I was the only one to say hi and have a short conversation with her while the other two just kept walking, so obviously that made her feel bad and left out. Her mom contacted my mom and told her what had happened and that she was so grateful that I had actually stopped and said hi. I decided to take it a step further and I texted her telling her that I was sorry she felt that way, we talked for a bit about what had happened and then she told me she was grateful I had reached out. The feeling of knowing you are the person someone is grateful for and that you had actually made an impact in their life is a feeling like no other, who would rather be the person who knows caused the heartache when you could be the person healing it and comforting people. That's who I want to be, I want to be the person who doesn’t cause problems but can express my feelings without being mean, I want to be the person who learns from my mistakes and my sad times to help other people. I do not want to be the person who causes the sad times, I just want to make people as happy as they can be.
The title I chose is “who am I?” and it's supposed to be a reflecting question like “who am I and who do I want to be?”. I think my piece represents the pandemic because a lot of what I talked about took place during quarantine or right before quarantine and that means you can either mope around or use this quarantine to make a change in yourself. I just wrote what I was feeling which is the easiest way for me to get out what I was thinking, I don’t know if this is called a short story but I just wrote. My inspiration was recent events that has happened in my life. I hope the audience will reflect on themselves and if they are the person they want to be.