Summer Break

Izusaki Tanase.

She is the girl who I saw looking at my memorabilia. I didn’t say much about it at the time, but I was really confused at how she found out about it.

The last day of middle school wasn’t like anything I’ve ever experienced before either. Much like yesterday, things were different. My school is pretty average to most people on the outside, but on the inside, it is really interesting.

I may not have interacted with the people there that much besides my teacher, gym coach, or principal. However, my classmates always seemed like fun to be around. I just was never used to showing everything about myself to them.

Making mineral memorabilias wasn’t something I thought anyone would find to be interesting I guess. When I saw Izusaki looking at it though near the last day of school, I didn’t have that much confidence to hope that she liked it.

If you have probably figured it out by now, my classmates thought I was boring. Not many at my school talked about this because of what happened when I first came to Augustine Elementary. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t have big dreams like they did.

When someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always these three words:

“I don’t know.”

To them, it sounded as if I was just going through a phase. The truth is I just liked being myself. Becoming something else entirely felt scary to me for some reason when I was little. There was a lot of pressure to answer a question that made me feel uncomfortable.

What if I didn’t just want to be one thing when I grew up? What if I wanted to choose to be a lot of things that weren't what they wanted?

These were the questions I had ever since that day. Whenever they saw that I was passionate about something, they started to say things like:

“I noticed you really like running, maybe you should become a track runner.”

“You’re really good at drawing, maybe you should become an artist.”

“You have exceptional grades in science, maybe you should become a scientist.”

These are called jobs. When I was told about these things that you could become growing up, I was constantly being reminded that I could only choose one thing that I liked to do for the rest of my life.

But that was the problem.

I liked doing more than one thing and not for the reasons they thought.