As a teenager, I was rebellious, and rebellious is taking it
lightly. I didn’t want to follow rules, I didn’t care what anyone thought of
me, and I slowly started throwing my life away day by day. It happened for me a
lot sooner than it does for most people.
I started drinking when I was 13. I didn’t come from a bad
family – I actually come from a very healthy and supportive family, but for
some reason I couldn’t get away from all of the bad people that were likely
beginning to ruin my life, and I didn’t care as I watched it slip away.
In 8th grade, I got kicked out of school because
I brought alcohol to class. Who knows what I was thinking, it just seemed like
a good idea at the time. This was far from the truth, to say the least. I
couldn’t understand at that age what the repercussions of something I thought
to be so minor could be. After my short stint away from class, I came back to
another world. Though my close friends hailed me because I had become so
popular for my poor choices, my teachers were much different. They wouldn’t
call on me in class, they whispered about me behind my back and disregarded me
as a student, believing me to be a poor influence on those young minds that
surrounded me as classmates. A lot of people weren’t allowed to hang out with
me; my parents were frowned upon as irresponsible adults that didn’t care about
their children, when in reality they were doing everything they could to get me
back on track to the A student I had been prior.
As my rebellion continued, it got harder and harder for me
to go to school and not be embarrassed. But the problem that triggered all of
this to continue was the hate I felt from those around me. When everywhere you
go, you’re constantly being judged, going anywhere and acting normal doesn’t seem
a possibility anymore.
This is a different kind of hate that I experienced, but I
do believe it holds some relevance in what we are advocating towards. If we
continue to break people down again and again, for being native, gay, black,
yellow, orange, LGBT, or any kind of different, how can change ever even come
in sight. We have to realize what ideas we are perpetuating: self hate, lack of
motivation, and frankly in my situation, I simply gave up and headed into a
dark place filled with a lot of things I am not proud of. I didn’t feel
comfortable at school, and I never want someone else on the Fort Lewis College
campus to feel the way I did.
The only way I stopped being so careless was by having
people surrounding me with positive reinforcement. I needed a support system to
get me out of the bad place I was in, and that’s what we need to provide at
FLC.
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