Who am I?/Where do I belong?

Growing up, I never felt completely that I fit in with the other boys. In sixth grade, I "lost" my best friend to football. I still saw him at school and Boy Scouts, but we no longer hung out or had sleepovers. He had practices and games. He had a different set of friends.
I used the labels "jock" and "nerd" because I felt more studious. I felt like a bit of an unpopular loser. I didn't fit that role very well. I was definitely not 100% nerd. 
Who was I? Where did I belong?
I often ask myself that. When I was a senior in high school, all that time ago, I asked myself that for a speech I gave at a retreat.

The retreat was for other teenagers to help with esteem and belonging.

My answers then were a lot different than they would be now -- over twenty years later -- but they would point to one central truth: we are more than what we are on the surface.

Sure, I’m a father and husband, but that is what everyone sees. I am much more than that.

When I was younger, the lines were more distinct between stereotypic groups.

An example of what I mean are how nerds and jocks used to be polar opposites. In high school, I was nerdy and a total outsider when it came to anything popular and the ones who played football (the “jocks”) were the ones in the “in crowd.”

The cliquish lines were not blurred the way they are now. Or so I thought.

There was one guy in my high school class (I call him ‘Jim’ for this illustration) who was really smart and played football.Freshman and sophomore year, he bullied me around. He called me names and ostracized me from conversation. Typical “jock” behavior, I felt.

Junior year, in an honors biology class (that I wasn’t smart enough to get into), students dared Jim to eat a piece of the perch they were dissecting in class. I don’t know if he barbecued it over a bunson burner or what chemical it was preserved in, but I heard that he ate some. He was smart and stupid at the same time.

And senior year, he apologized to me for being so rude to me the first two years of high school.

I was blown away that a “jock” would care about more than the game he played. I was wrong about how sport-centered “jocks” were, and about that category at all.

I’d thought that since I was a “loser,” that I wasn’t part of the problem. But I was. In opposing stereotypes so strongly, I reinforced  them.

[As a side note, Jim was also a student-leader in the retreat program I was involved with.]

I discovered at age eighteen that stereotypes could be (and often are) wrong. They were so ingrained in me, though, that I believed stereotypes for years to come (at least to some degree).

Sure, we cannot help but do some amount of pre-judging as humans (after all, we do make first impressions), but sticking to those prejudices is wrong. Holding to prejudices leads to forming stereotypes. Stereotypes are the foundations for labels. And labelled things get put into boxes.

People (unlike groceries) don’t fit in regular sized and shaped boxes. Each person has unique packaging.

The question that I started this post out with is continually valid. Who I am determines my packaging. It cannot be a rigid box, though, because I grow and change. And I am more than one person at a time. That may sound odd, but it’s true.

I am a dad AND a husband AND and employee AND a… well, a lot of things. All those things are labels, though. They are ways to name myself. Ways to separate me from others. With all those types though, there is overlap. Jim was a jock AND a nerd. A dumb smart person. We fit in multiple categories all the time.

I am a Writer. For years, I believed that was a destination and not an identity. I thought that I was just what I did for a paycheck.  I thought that self-publishing was “just a hobby.” Though I don’t earn a living at writing, I still “qualify.” I thought I had to make money at it for it to be who I am. But I was wrong. I am a Writer because it’s who I am. I embrace that identity now. As such, this is why I’m writing a blog.  

We need to find out who we are and embrace those things that make us unique.