Feeling Different Doesn’t Make a Difference.

I always believed I was more, better, different than my family and most of the people I went to school with. When I was younger I was quiet, reserved, my mother said I was shy but I wasn’t I just didn’t have anything in common with those around me, I don’t know when it happened, how it started but I began to feel different than those around me. My actions had consequences, everything I did had to be thought about, over and over until it felt like I was making the right decision, I owned up to the things I did wrong without hesitation, smoking and drinking were terrible, and I didn’t have to really try in school at least not in the courses that mattered like writing, history, art, and music, they just came naturally and making friends was as easy as breathing. I knew the college I was going to attend, we had toured it when I was in middle school and it just felt like I would belong there with ease, I had plans for my career at the time not writing but something distinctly different, something that would distance me from the crappy small town I had resigned to call my home. I knew I was unlikely to have children, it just wasn’t something I wanted, wasn’t something I was okay with settling with. I am not sure when that change happened either, when I stopped being different from those around me, drinking and smoking, struggling with the things I enjoyed. I stopped making plans, life got scary, I want to say that it’s because I got older and my plans adapted but that isn’t true or fair to me, I was afraid of my distinct lack of difference from everybody else. I settled. I am only twenty-two, I know that there is still life to live if I am to want it but I cannot help but feel as though what I could have had is long gone. I graduated high school at seventeen, I took it so seriously, I stacked my schedule to the brim, I took honor and college courses, trudging through it and then, COVID, months after losing my best friend and my grandmother, in the middle of my junior year suddenly I wasn’t going to breakfast joking around with my friends, or struggling to understand science, or even getting my cosmetology license on the side, I was home with my family that I couldn’t stomach in the grief that I was still lost in with the fear that someone else would be violently ripped from my life, and they were. Suddenly I was graduating and planning to leave the place I had been running from my entire life and I realized I wasn’t any different than my mother or my friends, I had fear instead of plans and it was bogging me down and I didn’t know how to stop it. People moved on, my fellow graduates went to college, most of them anyways, and unlike what I had been telling myself my entire life I was in my small town working a 9 to 5 with a pit and my stomach. I was the first on my mothers side to graduate high school, I was supposed to be the first to go to college, to travel, to not live paycheck to paycheck, and instead I was like my mother after all, sticking around for a guy and afraid of change, of hope.