Hello everyone!. I am happy to share again in Weekend Experience and the topics shared by Galenkp that are always nice and invite us to reflection. It has been a bit complicated to participate the last month, and I had a concert or recording every weekend, but today I celebrate my first Saturday off in almost two months, although I will talk about a topic that usually wipes my smile... High school... What a horrible time, but just like everything bad, I always heal those wounds a little when I write about it. I think the title of this post can already give you an idea of what I'm going to tell you, although I think I was not only the last choice for girls, maybe I was also the last choice for boys and for my teachers.
I see these pictures surrounded by my good friends and I think about my long road to 30 and I still can't believe it, I never really thought in my teens that I would do so well at this age, but I have understood that by being true to myself and my tastes I got to the right place with the right people. A place where I am not looked down upon for not being enough or hated for showing my talent. In high school that wasn't the case, and all those years my classmates took it upon themselves to prove it to me day after day, hour after hour. For starters, my big problem was being a musician, especially because of my choral singing voice. In an era where the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears were every girl's musical dream, nobody in high school wanted to hear someone their own age doing Venezuelan popular music, which had practically made me a child star in elementary school, and don't think I did it for pleasure, I really tried to be invisible, but the high school administrators made me participate and sent me to public events.
Each year of high school I only had one friend, a different one of course, which made me doubt those friends because when we changed sections they were no longer my friends. In the early 2000's there was still a lot of racism, my skin color was a reason for mockery and rejection, but additionally I was fat and my face had more acne than face. My family is humble and very respectful of the rules, and that's why today I respect the rules so much too, so I didn't wear modern shoes or extravagant hairstyles, either because of an economic factor or because it was not allowed, but the truth is that everyone violated the dress code a lot and spent all of high school in a constant fight with the board. I never liked sports, so I didn't do well with the boys in my class, I was always the last option for everything, and I understand them, I had no way to help, but I remember that the rejection was in the most humiliating way they could and many times they reached physical abuse, and it was outside of high school, which made me feel unsafe in the surrounding areas.
With the girls it was also terrible, and now I'm going with the title of this post. There was another boy in my classroom whose name happened to be Jesus. I think they always made fun of him more than me, and I really tried to be invisible so that no one would notice my presence and I wouldn't have to be humiliated. Jesus was teased for the same things I was teased for, but also he always had a dirty school uniform, and according to my classmates he smelled bad, so they would make way for him when he passed by. In my first year of high school there was an anniversary day where we were allowed to go out of uniform, and the shallows in my classroom noticed my sneakers and came up to me to talk, they were really cute, but there was one girl in that group who came up to me and told me not to believe much, that the next day my Cinderella story would be over. I remember I dared to ask her if I was worse than Jesus, the person they despised the most, and she said yes, I was worse. She told me that Jesus would get over it all if he took a bath and bought new clothes, and that it was obvious that he exercised, but that I was destined to bachelorhood, to be ugly and unpopular forever...
I remember those words as if they were yesterday; it hurt me a lot and I believed them, and I was just a freshman in high school. I think it was when I was 23, 10 years after that, when I started working in music seriously and started to change. I met people who were similar to me, and now I have a lot of friends, people who notice if I don't go to work one day. I still try to be invisible, but I have some popularity; for example, everyone knows that I have my blog on Hive, and although none of them end up creating their account, they know what I do and I understand why I take so many photos and record so many videos in our daily activities. I've been left with something in my soul, something that makes me always keep my eyes open about people, but that feeling of being the last choice of girls died when my wife came to save me from myself, and believe me she came at a crucial moment. I'd like to look back and think of high school with a smile, but I can't, this post has fallen short of everything that happened there. I don't even have pictures from that time in my life, although I have seen many of them as an adult, including the girl who said those words to me and they are very nice now. I know it's teenage stuff, but what can I tell you, I was a teenager too and I didn't need to humiliate or label anyone, I just know that now I value all the good people that come into my life and I never cease to be amazed by people's kindness, because it wasn't something very common in high school...
