Overcoming Sadness

This was a while back. I wanted to fit in, have really good grades, and become a better swimmer. I tried to fit in by talking to different groups of people, but that didn’t work out since they either spread rumors about me or only talked to people they knew from their past public middle school. I tried to have really good grades, but my math class terrified me. I tried to become a better swimmer, but people kept bringing me down. Although, these events have made me become a stronger person.

I should have known who my real friends were and who were mean, but I associated myself with a lot of mean people. They would often make fun of me for making a small mistake, talk about me without getting to know me, and call me derogatory terms I was not comfortable with being called. The mean words coming out of their mouth were so intriguing that I was thinking to myself, “how can anyone ever love me again?”. This thought stops running in my head now, because I became closer to the people who noticed my distress and tried to help me relieve me from it. They are now my close friends in school and I love listening to them, as much as they say that they like listening to me. I just wish my old math teacher would have listened to me.

I had a teacher that taught math in a really fast pace and I never felt so dumb in my whole academic career. I told her to slow down, but she never did. Whenever I asked her questions, the only thing she told me is that I “wasn’t trying enough,” and I felt miserable. The people who helped me the most in math were from my mom’s friend and my old best guy friend. Without them, I would’ve kept feeling like I wasn’t going to have a future. Now, I am in Math Analysis and I feel so grateful for my nice teacher and my mom’s friend. Whenever I ask my current math teacher for help, she responds, “always” and sacrifices some of her time to help me. I cry on the inside sometimes, because she has been the first math teacher that really listened and cared about helping me that much. I occasionally go to my mom’s friend’s house for support in math to discuss what I’m learning and discover what my weaknesses are; and it’s usually fun! My old guy friend died over the summer from a car accident and I’ll get to his story. I guess you just have to swim your way through life’s obstacles.

I have always felt like I was a slow swimmer, because I wasn’t as fast as other people. I kept thinking negatively about my body and skipped lunch sometimes (PLEASE DON’T DO IT BECAUSE IT FEELS REALLY HORRIBLE AND YOU CAN DIE), but that wasn’t the solution. The solution was from my two friends who noticed that I wasn’t feeling confident about swimming and my body, so they helped me with having a positive mentality and swim techniques. When I was going to ask one of my two friends how their day was, I heard a group of immature guys call him derogatory words. I walked up to the immature guys and told them to stop, but they didn’t, so I told a staff member and she made them stop. After that, I noticed him crying and he tried to turn away since he felt embarrassed, but I hugged him without saying anything. As I continued to get help from two of my friends, we became really close. The boy who helped me become better in swimming was the person who died in the car accident. My other friend moved to San Diego, but we FaceTime each other and usually talk about goofy things (Thanks Skylar). Life is too short to surround yourself with people who don’t care.

It’s hard to decide my happiness if people keep bringing me down, but I cope with it by smiling and pretending that they don’t have the power to make me sad.