Life experience ·3.1·

This is going to be a longer series. I will divide it into several parts, otherwise it will get too long.
However, I don’t know how many parts there will be yet. It will be finished, when I feel like I have written down everything.

In this series, I want to talk a little bit more about myself, my personality and my behavior towards other people. I will try to analyze myself and some situations I have experienced until now. I have been told by people who are close to me that sometimes they don’t really know what I am thinking, what’s on my mind. Maybe this series will answer some unspoken questions and it will  help them to understand me a little bit more. As you can guess already, this is going to be a bit more personal than the other posts, but somehow it is important to me to write down my thoughts concerning this topic that I have been thinking about a lot.

I honestly don’t know whether I can be content with being myself yet. However the one thing I know is that, when I was young, I wasn’t the person I am now. Nobody is.
People change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. I change, hopefully for the better (but you will never know), I saw people who changed and I see people changing. What is it that makes people change? And how can you tell whether a person has a good or a bad personality? What can influence a person’s personality? Is it even possible to differentiate between a bad and a good personality? It is indeed a very subjective matter.

Everything we see and everything we go trough will shape us in a way.

I think that my experiences during primary school and at the beginning of high school are some of the few factors that influenced the development of my personality a lot.
After this many years it isn’t a big deal to me anymore. However it was during that time and there were some situations I still remember today. Especially during primary school. I already talked about this subject in another post, but I didn’t manage to write down all my thoughts yet.

When I was in primary school I lived in a part of a small city which people like to call the ‚ghetto‘ of the city. I think you can tell already that this part of the city doesn’t have a really good reputation. Many foreigners live there and I remember when my family was still living there, there were cases of stealing, destroying cars and disputes between delinquents. My father’s car was broken into once and the car’s battery got stolen. It sounds pretty bad, but if you compare it to some places in America, it is more or less harmless.
However it is still a ‚ghetto‘, but a German one. Fortunately guns aren’t allowed in Germany.

There was a boy living in the same street as me and I was terrified of him at that time. I was constantly scared while walking to school and walking home, since it seemed like he harassed me every time he got the chance to. After so many years I don’t really remember his face anymore and yet, I still remember the feelings I had every time I spotted him.
It was the worst when one day, he was transferred into my class because he had to repeat a year. I was simply scared of him because he seemed so tall and I felt so small. However I told my family’s neighbour, a fierce older lady from Poland, who watched out for me when my parents weren’t at home, about this boy.
Then, one time, when I was sitting with her on a bench, he came by and she told him not to come near me again, otherwise he would regret it. After that he didn’t seem so threatening anymore.
I was really thankful to her that she was always trying to protect me. Especially when I didn’t expect my teachers to do anything about that boy. I couldn’t always count on them when I had problems. At least I didn’t feel like I could.
I am still thinking about a few situations today and I am asking myself from time to time whether those had a great impact on me or not.
I didn’t see things back then like I see them today and I am questioning things I didn’t question back then.
In primary school, the boys and girls in my class didn’t really play together during break. We were always playing separated. Sometimes the boys would find the girls to annoy them. It was more like a little banter, I think. It wasn’t a big deal, at least when you were in a bigger group of girls and boys.
It was a different matter if I had to deal with them by myself.

I think that as a child you don’t know how to deal with certain things yet. I couldn’t deal with the boys back then as I felt threatened by them in general. Every time they made fun of my ethnicity, every time they called me names, every time they confronted me because of my different look, I felt threatened by them. These were possibly the main reasons why I went to a girls‘ school when entering high school. I didn’t care what kind of school it was going to be. I just didn’t want to study with boys and from grade 8 until graduation I didn’t even try to hide my dislike towards them. So everyone knew about it. That also means that, while being in high school, I had little to no contact with the other gender.
It went so far that I had a difficult time dealing with the guys when entering university to study economics. I felt like I couldn’t talk to them comfortably and I would always feel stiff doing so. However I don’t think they noticed it. Besides it got better after a while after I got used to them.