I don't know who I should be..?!
Question: I don't know who I should be..?
I have had a very difficult life. without any details, Ill just say that I didn't have a normal childhood because of serious depression that took over my life which took over most of high school years and resulted in not experiencing life like most people. I come from a pretty broken family.
you would never know this by looking at me. I guess I have learned to hide it well from people.
I don't relate to anyone my age really or at my school, everyone comes from nice familie and they still have parents and money and lived a somewhat normal life.
I didn't. at all. I spent most of time trying to escape my life by doing drugs and somehow at the same time getting into college by freak chances.
I am a junior. so I know my way aorund college alittle. however, I just tranfered to a better college then where I was before. people here come from pretty privledged lifetsyles.
I am extremely smart, just have had a hard time dealing with my past.
I don't feel like I fit in with the successful healthy happy crowd of college students
though they accept me, but only because I don't wear my problems and my past on my sleeves...to be honest they would probabaly not even believe or begin to understand how I grew up.
basically...I don't know who I am becoming..this college graduate trying to make alife for myself and be "one of them"
or If I am who I always have been in the past. The destructive sad going nowhere in life person who is bound to live a messed up broken life.
I feel like I don't fit in with both crowds honestly. I don't think I am this happy go lucky successful postive person, but I don't feel like I use to feel..the sad destructive wanting to give up on life. I feel sort of inbetween
Im am not sure if this is a choice I have to make or if it is something that will just happen
I feel like my past is me. and I feel like I lie to people because I am not honest about how I grew up. It seems like everyone wants to be friends with me, but these are people that are going to be highly successful people. I feel out of place. I dont relate to their lives. While they were having piano lessons growing up, I was trying to survive within a broken home. while they were traveling and seeing places in high school and doing "normal teen things" I was struggling with trying to numb my pain with pills and weed, while rasiing my younger brother in a house with a pervert father.
while their parents got their PHDS and masters and held jobs, my parents...well....lets just say..didn't even get close.
Is this normal? to feel not apart of it, and wanting out, even though this is probably the healthiest enviroment I have ever been in?
I guess, because of the fact that I dont look like I came from a serious backround, people tend to think I am one of them, but I am not
but then again, being around low lifes isnt who I am either. I always felt like I was more...but not enough to be the others.
is this a normal phase of development?
how will I figure out what to do.
sometimes I want to just give up and be careless and stupid again
but that doesnt long before I want to be something and someone again
but when I am in the postion, I don't feel like myself because all I know is surviving and coping.
any same experiences?
anything??
Answers:
There are no dysfunctional families that are normal, yet there are a lot of them, perhaps even more than functional families. Like the great Russian novelist Tolstoy wrote, "Every happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Try not to dwell on the past and your family, look within yourself, dig deep, and try to move on with your own destiny. Stop comparing yourself to others. Celebrate your uniqueness. Find a way alter your standard of value so that you can appreciate the preciousness of your position, what a treasure it can be when we do NOT fit in. Let all those other "somebodies" with their shiny PhDs and their well-adjusted backgrounds (if that's how you see them; you might be surprised) revel in their "somebodiness." Meanwhile, let yourself just be you for a change; revel in your selfhood. Spend some time getting to know who you are rather than worrying about others and who they are. And if, for a time, you still cannot see the value in yourself, reflect that if you must consider yourself a nobody, even that is better than their "somebody" because it's all yours. However "little" I am by somebody's else's standard, what I am is all mine. What they have may not belong to me; but neither does what I have belong to them. And finally, perhaps, you might also recall these immortal words from Emily Dickinson, who by all accounts lived and died without having any of what all those somebodies have either:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
let it be.