Final Paper Ellis

The Assimilation and De-individualization That Led Me to Find Myself

The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.

― Leo Buscaglia

Major Stages In My Life

California: Born & Raised

As a child I have always been a unique spirit who marched to the beat of my own drum. Growing up in Southern California was a perfect environment for a curious and open-minded little girl. I was always creative and did things the way that I wanted to do them. I never thought to be ashamed of being a little unique; on the contrary, I was lucky enough to have amazing parents who would positively reinforce these traits. My parents provided me with a supportive environment and they always encouraged me to be myself.

Just a part of my beanie baby collection

The way that they raised me helped me develop a strong self-esteem. Living in Southern California for the beginning of my life you can understand that other children around me were very different themselves and we were raised in an environment where our differences were celebrated. Hardly any of my classmates looked like me and growing up in a culturally diverse environment taught me to become accepting to people that are different.

I did things like most little girls anywhere growing up would do like playing little league sports and going to birthday parties of kids in my class and developing hobbies like collecting a ridiculous amount of Beanie Babies and horseback riding and as I got older these hobbies changed into going to the mall with a huge group of girls and spending days at Santa Monica Pier playing carnival games or walking up and down Venice Beach and watching street performers. It never fazed me that I may end up somewhere completely different than what I was familiar with.

Santa Monica Pier 

The Move To Suburban Ohio

So during the beginning of puberty when I was starting the awful awkward stages of becoming a young adult, my dad had to change jobs and move us into suburban Ohio. I was in a stage of my life where I would be excited for something new. My older sister who was going to be a sophomore in high school was completely horrified by the idea of leaving her friends and going somewhere completely new but I was excited for a new experience. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my school and my friends but I was thrilled to try something new. I did not have a doubt in my mind that I was going to love my new school and everyone was going to love me.

First Day of School

The first day of school was a reality check for me. I was going into the 8^th grade at Nagel middle school in Cincinnati Ohio and we still weren’t completely moved into my house. I had spent a sleepless night on a bean-bag chair in my basement going over and over difference scenarios that could happen. I still remember the exact outfit I picked out. My idea was to look casual and cool.. It’s a funny concept we have, to spend so much time and energy on making sure to look like you did not spend time or energy on yourself. So here I was, waking up before the sun rises wearing ripped jeans, vans sneakers that I had colored on and decorated myself, and my favorite zipup jacket with the batman logo on the front standing at the bus stop and anticipating my first encounter with these people that I could potentially call my new friends. 

Nagel Middle School, (looks like a jail)

The second I walked on there were miserable sleepy faces looking back at me with little to no interest. In the situations I had played out in my head I imagined there would be a friendly-faced stranger who would offer me a seat next to them. Instead I sat in an empty seat, silently. We finally pull into the school parking lot and my hands were shaking. I look out to see all the students and realizing that this was not the whole school’s population but just one grade of it! This school had to be 5 times bigger than my old one. We sit down in our homeroom and when taking attendance the teacher called my name and I stood up and announced that I was new to Ohio like I had seen people do on TV when they went to a new school. The teacher blinked and stared at me and all finally responded by saying “Good for you.” I was horrified and slunk into my desk and she continued on with a long speech of what we do in homeroom.  As the teacher is rambling on, I try to make funny side comments or ask them questions to try and make conversations with the people around me. People looked at me as is if it had physically caused them harm that I had spoken to them. I had found this extremely strange because I knew that I was not completely social incompatible with other human beings because this is how I made friends easily when I switched to a different school in California. I was completely confused and horrified that I had received such a reaction and I was grateful when that class was over. 

The next class I walk to I sat down and kept to myself and tried to play it cool.  While I am attempting to keep to myself, kid leans over to me and says “Hey I like your jacket”. I blinked at him and said nothing for a split second because I didn’t know if I had heard correctly. This was the first thing that a student had said to be and it was a compliment! I was thrilled. The day went on and I was thrilled to have survived the first day. I got onto the bus to go home and noticed that people were a little more wary of me the second time around but still, to prevent myself from saying anything stupid I sat quietly and processed the day’s events in my mind.

Becoming more than just the “new girl”

Batman jacket that I loved but eveyrone else made fun of

Once the week of being the new girl was over with and people were more aware of my presence, I started to realize that there was something I really did not like about this school. First of all it seemed like there were a few large groups of people who seemed very close and didn’t talk to anyone besides the select members of these groups. Second of all the kids that I thought were funny and would have been considered really cool at my old school were made fun of by the students who sat in class and said nothing but a few words to only each other. I couldn’t tell if this school was particularly mean spirited or if this was just how middle school was. Either way I was terrified to think that people could be saying these things about me. Also there were a lot of fights that would break out at lunch or in the hallways, a lot of which being between girls. To make things worse, the girls who started the fights were in all of my classes. I had always been a friendly and passive person so I had no idea how to deal with these mean girls. They started to invite me to hang out and out of fear of offending them I reluctantly accepted. I ended up becoming sucked into their friend group and I was miserable but I figured that bad friends were better than no friends, right? 

This is when I first started to notice that I was losing my identity. I was finding myself being drug around by people whose actions I did not agree with, let alone that I liked! The Maddie that I knew would never put herself in a situation like this. I was really starting to hate this school and to make matters worse, the second time I had worn my batman jacket to school the boy and his group of friends came up to me at lunch and started making fun of it, which to my horror I realized that he had never liked in the first place, he had been making fun of me to my face and I never comprehended it. I realized then that I had to change, whether I liked it or not, if I was going to make it through living here.

The Assimilation and loss of my “self”

Clothing

All the girls dressed the same in way and as open minded as I tried to be, I hated it. They would all wear a middle school team hoody with some tacky nickname as the name on the back with bright colored soccer shorts and soccer flip flops with socks (even though most of them didn’t even play soccer), their hair perfectly straightened and pulled back into a pony tail and they all had little plastic bows from the toddlers department in Target on. I had no idea how to even straighten my hair, let alone could I imagine myself wearing a stupid plastic bow. The first time I saw this I swore to myself that I would never dress like that, but people the way that people looked at my old torn up chucks with mismatching shoe laces and the comments they would make about my corduroy backpack made me realize that I needed to make some changes.  Changing what I wore was not my first choice but it seemed that the more I stood up to the demeaning negative comments people made about my clothing, the more they wanted to badger me. All I wanted was to fit in and find my place in this school. Eventually I put away the band t-shirts and Converse and tried a more subtle transition. I started to wear clothing from Abercrombie and Fitch, which wasn’t all that bad but I still missed my fun clothing.

My parents understood what I was going through and although they were reluctant at first, they were supportive of the new front I was putting out but only if it made me happy. The more the year went on I became more comfortable with the idea completely following what the “in crowd” did. Eventually you could see me rocking soccer flip-flops, pink polka-dotted Hummel shorts and a boy’s Nagel football sweatshirt that I made one of my few real friends, Tyler, let me borrow. Tyler was a good friend because not only did he like me for who I was before I changed but he did not resent me for trying to assimilate into this middle school culture. After I started to look like everyone else I realized that the kids who once thought they were too good for me started to show an interest in me. At this point in time I understood that how you present yourself was just only the first step and there was a lot more I needed to change in order to really assimilate.

Personality/ Demeanor

My first mistake that I made walking into the school seeming timid and overly friendly. This immediately made me an easy target. I guess it was showing that I desperately wanted to make new friends showed that I did not have a secure friend group to stand up for me. This realization is what caused me to become more withdrawn socially and only spending time with a select few people, which were mainly Tyler and a few girls that had been kind to me from the start. As a person who thrives off of social situations, I knew that I would only be truly happy living life as a social butterfly. I became more outgoing but this was not like how I was in the beginning. I had a stronger and more abrasive side to me that refused to let anyone push me around anymore. At first I liked this new side of me but then began to realize that instead of being the one who was being bullied, I started to bully the people who had hurt me. I thought that humiliating these people who were so nasty to me at first would make me feel better but deep inside I knew that I was becoming someone who I never thought I would be. 

If I could go back in time and tell the younger me that things will get much better in time and that being hurtful to other people will do nothing but cause you pain, I would in a heart-beat. Sometimes children being bullied become the bullies. "They take their frustration and emotional upset and direct it toward others," he said. "If you find a bully, it's worth assessing if they themselves have been bullied." (CNN Health) Now it is obvious that bullying is just a vicious cycle but at the time that fact was not as clear as it is to me today. This new demeanor false sense of confidence was starting to attract the attention and fascination of a crowd that I never imagined would I would become a part of.

Circle of Friends

At first it was the boys who started to become nicer to me. It must have been the hard to get attitude and the newfound confidence or the fact that I was trying harder on my appearance to try and fit in. Either way they started trying harder to befriend me, which eventually lead to the “cool” girls to start inviting me to hang out with them. By freshman year in High School I was going with popular girls to football games and even wearing one of the starting football players Jerseys! I remember every time I was invited to hang out with them I tried my hardest to not do anything that could be embarrassing. 

Before the football game

My parents were thrilled that I was finally starting to really love Ohio and whenever I asked to have my new friends over they were thrilled. This is what caused me to take advantage of their trust and support. I would make them promise not to come into the basement and embarrass me which gave me the opportunity to have underage drinking parties in the basement. At first I felt bad but I realized that I was beginning to make a lot of new friends and I was constantly getting invited to all of the major social scenes that the cool kids never missed out on. It was then that I realized that people liked me for all the wrong reasons and these “friends” were getting me into bad situations. When I kept getting in trouble with my parents, this caused great strain on our relationship, which caused me to lash out and do things just to retaliate. I had finally made it into the “in” crowd and had a plethora of friends but I still did not feel happy like I thought I would.

Although on the outside I seemed to fit in, deep down I knew that I had no real connection with these kids. I had made these friends for all the wrong reasons and it made me miserable, but I was good at hiding it. Towards the end of High School I realized that I could not wait to get away from all these people I had known for years, even the ones I considered to be my best friends. Something that I always could relate to and that inspired me was the song “Drive” by the band Incubus.

It's driven me before and it seems to be the way that everyone else gets around but lately I am beginning to find that when I drive myself my light is found

This line stood out to me that I am not going to ever get to where I want to be if I’m letting what everyone else does and thinks dictate what I do and that the best way to get what I want is by being the one who is in control of my life. This song made me realize that the best thing to do is to be who you want to be, which meant that I needed to reevaluate things and become myself again.

Reestablishing the “self”

Going Somewhere New

Before I left for college I promised myself that I would never become someone I am not just to become liked. This major transition in my life was the perfect chance to start over new. While most of my High School friends decided to stay in Cincinnati out of fear of having to meet new people, I knew that I had to get out of Cincinnati. Going to college where you know almost no one is an interesting but trialing experience. Anything was better than the limbo of perceived happiness that I had back at home. I was looking forward to meeting people for all the right reasons.

Meeting the Right People

My sorority of weirdos I call my sisters

They say college is a time where you really discover yourself because of all the things you experience and the people you meet. I was looking forward to making friends because I liked them, not because they happened to be in the same crowd as me. My first few friends were people who lived around me and seemed just as lost as I was. I knew that these weren’t the friendships that I had been dying for but it was nice to not feel alone. Eventually I decided to go through rush but had to suppress the fear that rushing a sorority would put be back into the same predicament that I experienced before. I was going to make damn sure that not matter what I was going to be my true self. The one thing I noticed about the sorority I ended up joining is that I felt the most comfortable there than at any other house. I realized that this was an interesting mix of personalities that seem to perfectly mix. I realized that I could be my weird and silly self around them and instead of receiving blank stares, these girls would be laughing with me and going along with my jokes. When you finally meet a group of friends that know every weird quality you have and support you through thick and thin, its an amazing feeling. I have made deeper friendships with my friends in college within the past 2 ½  years than the friendships that I made in 5 years at home. This gave me the confidence and contentment that I had been missing for years.

Find friends who love you for who you are.

Learning to love myself

Since going to college and making a close knit group of weirdos that I call my friends, I have become more confident than I ever have. Although I did things in the past that I regret and a part of me is still angry that I tried to change who I was for all those years, I think it made me appreciate what I have going for me more than I would have if I did not go through a time of denial an shame. No matter the number of how many people that like you, you can never be happy unless you truly love yourself. Now I never second guess myself and realize that the only people who belong in my life should be the people who love me for whom I am.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

- Dr. Seuss

"Forest Hills Local Schools." Forest Hills Local Schools. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

Landau, Elizabeth. "When a Bullied Kid Grows up." CNN. Cable News Network, 08 Oct. 2010. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

Incubus. Drive. SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, 2000. MP3.