Being Different Is Not An Easy Game.

We must never be afraid to be a sign of contradiction for the world.” ~Mother Teresa
I've always felt like I was different ever since I was in elementary school. When I started understanding things when my personality started to settle. Initially, I thought that I am thinking too much but I realized that I don't think, act, look as my peer.

At that point of time, I start to know that I was different from others and people around me made sure that I knew it. Weirdo, idiot were two of their favorite names.

In current times there are many other other labels to identify uniqueness: depressive, ADHD, antisocial and some other medical terms. Socially, there are many other labels: problematic, troublemaker, weird, crazy and dramatic among others.

As the year went by the bullying didn't stop. People use to call me by different names, at the beginning these things use to affect me a lot but I never shared this thing with anyone. With the time I got used to it and gradually these things stopped affecting me.

At some point in time, I tried hard to fit in but trying to be something I wasn't become emotionally drained. I became a very reserved kind of person. In high school, I made few friends but I was very different from them. Which made me feel more uncomfortable I started to believe that I am difficult to understand and difficult to love.

When you are not a part of the crowd you have to face a certain type of ignorance. I wasn't a part of the crowd so people(classmates, teachers) use to ignore me.

The world tends to see what is different as something ugly and wrong as if anything “abnormal” is something needing to be fixed.

It was all so disturbing for me because I wanted to live a normal life, a life without getting bullied, a life without getting compared to others. So to be like everyone else I started to copy people around me in order to become cool. I tried to copy looks of other girls, I started to use different beauty products, I even tried to speak in the way other girls use to talk and many other things.

Becoming someone else made me more upset. Then one day while scrolling feeds I saw a video wherein a lady talked about to be yourself I saw the video and thought why am I doing this? Fitting in is not gonna help me, in fact, this is making me sicker. I loathed myself. I had turned into this person I didn't like for the sole purpose of “fitting in.” But at the same time I hated what I was, I hated being oversensitive, stupid, a daydreamer, rebellious, and sad.

After struggling in school I moved forward to another phase of life called college. It was a new chapter of my life and I wanted it to be different from the previous chapter.

At the beginning of my college, I became friends with a girl and with the flow of time, I got to know that we both are exactly the same. This made me very happy after such a long time I finally experienced that feeling of being loved or being accepted. I was more than happy. But because of some problems I had to take admission in another college (lateral entry).

So it happened again, even in another college, I had to deal with the stigma of being considered stupid by my peers, for having bad grammar and spelling mistakes and other things.

After all, this what I understood:
It was their limited mindset that created in them an inability to accept other people's differences. But that wasn’t my problem. I wasn't what they saw.

My problem came from the fact that I had given them the power to control my self-esteem instead of finding that acceptance and love within ourselves.

As more years passed, experience taught me a deeper understanding of my place in this world.
I came to forgive and love myself because I was never ugly, stupid, antisocial, or psychotic, as the world saw me. I felt like that because I was looking at myself through their eyes instead of my own.

I've met wonderful people with whom I can be myself, and even if I don´t have thousands of friends, I have a few who are worth the world.

Different is what I'll always be because I don't match with the preferred educational, economic, religious, and social systems that want to shape me into a predesigned mold that I can't fit into.

Everyone wants you to be what is best for them, not what is best for you. Wanting to please everyone and be what is socially acceptable stole my personality away.

However, by accepting myself, I came to realize that I am absolutely beautiful. Not because I am better or worse than anyone else, but because I am exactly what I am supposed to be.

Everyone is different in some way or another, but only a few dares to show it to the world. The majority try to fit into a mold that is too tight to feel free in.