I am weird, I know it, I felt it all my life.
I always thought differently from everyone, I always felt I was different.
And now I know it.
Being different is not an easy task to live. It is wonderful and a burden too.
It is wonderful because you can really see other perspective in life in many many things, but you will not be fully understand by anyone, you will be judged for being different and people will often assume you are trying to impress someone or that you could try to be just like everyone else.
Being different cost me many things in life. The first one was my self confidence, and self esteem. I felt was never enough, I was never enough like my school buddies, they were an example, I was the hurricane. They went by the rules, I was… different, challenging, defiant, hard to teach, and somehow I always felt I was hard to love, by teachers, by friends, and even by my family. Why I had to be so loud, so chatty, …so me?
In my first grade I add this work to do in class, and basically we had to draw with some geometric plastic figures, we draw the outline and form another images with the geometric shapes. I saw my friends were all making Houses, since the geometric figures were squares, rectangular and triangular figures it was easy to make a house. Instead I made a Girl, her head was the circle, and the was the “geometrical girl”, I put all the other geometric figures around her, like floating around.
I remember I was proud and happy with my draw, that feeling didn’t last, my teacher saw it and immediately draw a big “X” on top of my draw, she said it was all wrong, i should make a new shape and not dispose all of them in a circle. I get it know, she was doing her job, but i remember how hurt it felt and how i’ve cried so much she even erased the “x” and placed a “check” instead, saying it was right. But the evil was made. I believe this was the beginning of my impostor syndrome, I never have felt secure in school since ever, and in any job until nowadays, even when people say my work is good and they like my work. I say i know my work is good and valuable, and I know it because people say it so many times, but I don’t feel it, never.
I feel very insecure with everything about me, not only in my professional life, (and i became a designer and illustratior so you can imagine how i feel insecure about my drawing since ever), but slso about my physical appearance, and people say i am beautiful since i was a baby, for real, and that always made me uncomfortable, like i eanted to believe but I didn,t. When I was a kid I always answered I was very ugly when a lady said every day: “how beautiful is this girl”.
A few months ago I found a comic with a clumsy girl and I immediately relate to her, the comic talked abou ADHD. I started to search about it, and it was really me they were talking about, all the struggle i had in life, and the misunderstood stuff in my life, all the severe criticism i had live with, first from my family, then from my teachers, school friends, and worse, myself. All the intern criticism was so deep and strong, I was never good enough, not even to myself. I understand better now but it it hard to shut down the internal voices always criticizing and judging me for everything I do, in my job, in my personal life, in my spiritual life. I felt I was suffocating with this internal voices.
sometimes i think how would be my life if my mom had sent me to a neurologist like she almost had, if my life could turned different if I knew earlier, if i had grown up knowing this about me instead of judging me all the time for everything i had different from others. I know this is not good to overthink so I am just trying to move on.
I hope this knew understanding about myself helps me to make emends with me.
