Simple Plan – Astronaut

This is currently my jam.
I like this song because it’s so… me.
It reflects how I felt (and possibly still feel) about the world and the people surrounding me. I felt like nobody really understood me, and even though some people tried to show compassion, their eyes didn’t reflect the words they said. Now I’m more understanding, of how other people my age have their own needs and concerns.
I don’t like how I’m different from everybody else. I want to grow and mature with them, not before them. Because then, I will be isolated in my own little box, in my own little category, and will often be left out of conversations.

So, tonight, I’m calling to all the astronauts out there, who feel like they don’t belong: please stay strong. Don’t ever let anybody else tell you otherwise. Don’t take the endless criticisms to heart — use them as experience, as a launching pad. Then, when you are over them and their meaningless taunts, show them who you really are. The hardest part for me was always to stay nice to the people who disliked me for pretty much two-thirds of my life. However, that is one of the most essential parts in human communication. And because there are many people out there who will discriminate, judge, and criticise, please do try to be nice.

Lyrics in the video.

Farewell

I don’t know if I should feel sad about missing the farewell party or just plain indifference.

After all, in some ways, I’m not even part of the group.

It should not have mattered if I went or not because I would not have made a difference.

Yet I wonder if I would have marked myself more deeply into the leavers’ memories.

So I remind myself once more that one dinner party would not have had enough power to change relationships that each of us have so painstakingly built over the past 8 years or so.

There is no conclusion to this, just the reinstatement of the fact that I missed it, along with all of the fun that came with.

But should it matter that I missed the fun that never really involved me?

World War III

Setting: right under parents and teachers’ noses, at school.

I’ve faced what I call rejection for more than 6 years and watched new kids fit in. I mean, it is common knowledge now that I have to hang out with myself at recess, sit by myself during lunch, be the last one to be picked at basketball, not join the giggling girls chatting in the hallway, be the last person anyone wants to be in a group with in class, etc. Nobody says anything, but when I walk towards a bunch of gossiping girls, they start to talk quietly and glance at me every now and then – that’s my cue to leave.

I wondered what I did wrong and why I wasn’t part of the group. After all, I was here since grade one. There are people who came in at the same time I did and are extremely popular. Therefore there must be something wrong with me, which is stopping me from being included into the group.

I believed what everybody else believed: this is just a phase, it happens to [literally] everyone, there’s nothing to worry about. Other people reassured me that it was not that bad, and I just had to say ‘no’ (I tried that.) But all this time, just because I didn’t try to be like everybody else, I was not accepted. There was this rule, where if you were not like everybody else, you were nothing.

Well, of course, since this was more of a passive aggression or more specifically, social aggression, I often doubted if this was all just my imagination. I wondered if I was victimizing myself, and if there was really nothing to worry about. But at the same time, I was also taking precautions, if that is what you call preventing something that may or may not be happening at the moment from happening in the future.

Mom told me that I was more mature than the rest of my classmates, that I was an old soul. She said (a few years ago) that if I just waited (a few years more) then it would get better. Well, I suppose it did, and that’s why I am writing about it. Yet, after all the experience, it is hard to have wanted to be such an old soul. Maybe I wanted to be just like the rest of my classmates and not have a care in the world. Then today, I can still pay less attention in class, be less of a perfectionist, and not set such high goals for myself. Life would have been so much easier if I was raised just like everybody else.

Then, to think about it, I like the current me a bit more. Now I see that with all this experience, it is less likely I will be faced with the same problem in the future. School is a good time to learn such things; it’s better to make mistakes at school than to make them in the future, when you’re out there in the “society”. There is a good side to bullying after all! Sadly, it only works for people who have enough support at home (or any other place where they belong and can feel safe) to provide them with a reasonable amount of security to face the bullies. If something goes wrong at home, victims have nowhere to turn to, and will usually become depressed.

In conclusion, it’s all in the parents. Hi, parents! Please don’t yell at your children. Everything happens for a reason. If your child does something wrong, it may be because of bullying, peer pressure, any other form of pressure, etc. It could be because of you. If you have to yell, try to listen before you do so. Can’t learn from this? Go read a book. Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons can be a good start. I’m not sorry that I’m being very a bit offensive here. After all, I’m a teenager, you’re a parent, so you should learn to accept that us teens can be brats sometimes.

Note: please check out my About page: https://philosophiseme.wordpress.com/about/

Niceness Rules

The trick about mean people is to be nice to them — mean people are scared of nice people. A mean person will be taken aback if you’re nice to them in return. One would be scared to see that you’re strong enough to not be affected by his or her mean motives. The reason why they have picked on you is not important; you were probably picked on because they need someone to pick on and you seemed like a good target (don’t take it personally). Prove them wrong not by saying ‘no’ to them (in most cases ‘no’ would just make everything worse) but doing the unpredicted.

Female Aggression

The biggest problem about any form of bullying really is that society believes it is WRONG to be mean and we SHOULD be nice to each other. This is an even bigger problem with girls because it is society that first created the idea that girls should be generally nicer than boys. This idea just stuck, and girls now have no other way of expressing their anger than doing it secretly, against people close to them like friends and family. Society then deeply disagrees with this behavior and however does not HELP young girls (and boys) DEAL with the problem they so disagree on, and only try to STOP it by one of the most ineffective ways possible — through addressing the problem with THE BULLIES THEMSELVES. Educating teenagers through lectures, after all, is one of the worst ways to make teenagers understand something, and is a completely stupid idea. Has any one of those “say no to bullies/be nice to other people” talks ever paid off? For your information, the only thing one can get out of these lectures is that society does not approve with girls expressiong themselves and therefore resulting in girls being even more passive aggressive — “we should be more secretive.”