Page 184

Starting my senior year was difficult enough having to do everything online, but when it came to this quadmester, my art class was the least of my worries. But of course, as I had expected, I start the semester off with waterworks, a heavy stream of tears to stain my face as I'm nearly forced to go through my memories from the past and everything that I've been trying to suppress from the past couple of years.

Our first assignment in this lovely class was poetry, as I had expected, and we were to study a song or piece of poetry, relate it back to ourselves to create an art piece in the coming weeks. At first I had wanted to do a Jon Bellion song, since in the 10th grade when I had taken art his music had basically carried me through all of my assignments and I used him as a scapegoat for a majority of the material. But I knew that my teacher was most likely expecting this from me and I wanted to spice things up, give myself a challenge to step out of my comfort zone and actually study poetry rather than music. There's a book that I have that I had gotten back in May of 2017, a book that really helped to carry me through a weird and difficult time of my life.

During this period of my life, I was in the 8th grade, working my inexperienced ass off into being the best student I could be so I could get into the high school that I wanted and really push into the territory of finding out who I am and what it is I wanted to do with my life. At the beginning of that year, I had begun to date my ex girlfriend, but looking back at it now, there was no relationship within what I thought to have been love. I also started going by Alex, questioning my existence, gender, sexuality and everything under the sun that related to my self identity. I chopped off all my hair from past my shoulders into a pixie cut and told myself that if I truly was into girls, that I needed to change everything about myself to physically show that. If only I could go back to tell myself how stupid that made me look and how in the next couple of years it would drive me down into the darkest hole I would ever see myself in.

I was bullied a lot during this time and I took it out on myself a ton because I kept telling myself I just wasn't trying hard enough, that everyone was making fun of me because I wasn't masculine enough. I wanted to detach myself so much from my real name and identity that I began to lose sight in what I really wanted in life, and that was to be happy. When I broke up with my ex girlfriend, I felt like I had lost something in myself and that all my efforts to detach this femininity from myself was going to waste. So instead of any normal person going to their parents with their struggles, I threw it onto (at the time) the people I considered to be my friends, and this book finally came into my life to start opening my eyes.

Connor Franta's Note To Self really made me realize that the feelings I had were not weird, and that other people in the world were having the same thoughts and emotions in their own lives. Words could not describe how much I resonated with this book, and to this day I still do. But the memories attached to these words, the people I would speak to about this book, the sadness from everything within these pages just stuck right to the ink and would not let go, something I came to realize right when I opened this book again after almost three years of it sitting on my bookshelf to collect dust.

All the negative emotions just spit into my face and I could vividly remember reading certain pages of this book to people, crying on snowy nights because of things that had been said to me during the day while I read this book for comfort at night. Even though I have grown so much over the past three years, I could feel how much pain I had left on these pages and I wish that I could go back in time and tell myself how well things are going to get, and that I wouldn't ever have to worry about all the shitty people that were in my life in the future.

You're of course probably wondering what exactly is the tipping point to making me cry after all these years and reading over this book again, and that would have to be the poem on page 184. This poem applied to me before, it applies to me now and I think until I truly figure out who the fuck I am and what I'm meant to do in this life, it will still continue to apply to me. The truth in this poem, how hard it hits close to home, the photo to accompany the poem on the following page, the ideas flowing through my mind as I use this poem for my art assignment. Everything just fits together so perfectly in a hybrid of emotions that I'm honestly so glad I opened this book again to finally let go of all the negativity I was living with in my life.

As I finish of my final months of high school to slowly open up the new chapter of my life to enter college next year, I can see myself changing for the better, remembering my past but not being dragged down by it. Everything I had gone through before has made me into the person that I am today, but I just wished that somehow, someway I could go back to being the person I was before. Without all of the negatives to be dragging behind me like a ball and chain.

somebody else - Connor Franta

i am not myself these days

i appear to be somebody else

i look in the mirror

i do not see me anymore

i wake up in the morning

i do not feel like me any longer

i am not myself these days

i appear to be somebody else

i want the old me back