"Growing Up"--Aaryn

There’s always been this unspoken agreement in my family that I have abided by for as long as I can remember. You don’t go against what your family believes. It’s not that they’re mean or cruel, they’ve just always been stuck in their ways, and challenging those ways was something that I didn’t have the courage to do. How exactly do you sit down and tell your devout Christian family that you have never been (and probably never will be) religious? How can you explain to women that spend every day of their lives catering to their men, that you don’t like the concept of marriage? How do you tell your family that believes that people are either straight or gay that you fall on the spectrum? In simple terms, you absolutely do not. For so much of my childhood I was brainwashed to believe only in the things that they believed in. I’d dread going to church on sundays because I didn’t feel anything, and then I’d feel guilty for even having those thoughts. All of the things that I attribute to who I am today, once upon a time made me feel like a freak. The people I looked up to, the music that I always played too loud, the books that I read over and over, they were things that I was ostracized for because they weren’t things that the rest of my family liked and did. Growing up feeling like everything that I liked and was interested in was weird ultimately made me really insecure. I never let my friends at the time see who I really was because I was scared. I was content to be the shy, agreeable girl that everyone liked. I was okay with pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Around freshman year, I sat back and thought about who I was and how I felt, and I decided that I didn’t like what I saw, and that I wanted to be different. I started opening up to my parents, I started dressing differently, and talking to new people with different mindsets. These seemingly small mental and physical changes actually had the largest effect on me. For the first time in my life I felt confident enough to be myself completely, to express my beliefs and interests, and to open up about what I wanted and what made me happy. As Im nearing the end of my senior year I can acknowledge how different I am and how much I’ve grown up. Obviously my current circumstances are very different, simply because I got older and stopped caring. Nowadays I live with the mindset that nothing really matters besides living life the way that you want to and being your most authentic self. I still feel resentful towards my family and I’ll always live with the knowledge that they will never truly know me or understand me. With that being said, I’m happy I have friends that I can be completely myself around, as well as great parents and siblings that go out of their way to respect how I feel and haven’t tried to mold me into the person they think I should be. In hindsight, I guess growing up the way I did was actually beneficial because it gave me thick skin and taught me that not everyone is going to feel the way I do about certain things, and that’s okay.