Just My Story
So if I had to put my entire life story down in one blog post, this is how it might go. I was born and I was a very cute, very happy and energetic kid. I would smile and laugh so hard I would make friends everywhere I went. Then when I was a year and a half I went to India and stayed with my grandparents for a little while.
Here is where things get kind of blurry and dicey. I don’t want to get into the details but I was abused by someone in that home and it was not my grandparents. I came back from India a year and a half later and I completely shut down. I was silent. My bubbly nature disappeared. I distinctly remember one time I held my father’s feet at the door so he could not go to work and screamed and cried because I thought he would not come back.
But then I joined a day care that I loved and had some really good friends there. After that, I went to Kindergarten and was teased a lot for various reasons. I remember being in first grade after and I distinctly remember this girl telling me I looked uglier than her Native American doll which she said was pretty ugly. I lived in an all-white city and didn’t understand how to deal with being Indian.
A couple years later, my cousins came and lived with us for six months. It was so much fun having more kids around the house and all we did was play for hours and days. Those are some of my best childhood memories. After they left I was very sad for a while and I channeled my emotions through starting to write poetry. I realized I wanted to be a writer and a teacher.
Middle school was a nightmare, as it is for many people. I moved cities in middle school so it was even more difficult. I made some friends at my new school but I was definitely an outcast. I was also very sad to leave all my old friends at my old school. It was a difficult move.
In eighth grade, however, I lost some weight and even had a boyfriend for a hot minute. My best friends were these Indian girls from the Gurudwara or Sikh Temple. Middle school became better and I would spend hours and lots of money on phone calls to my friends. When I entered high school I started to grow up a little and become more of a woman.
I discovered make-up and put on too much at first. I discovered that I really liked boys and always had a few crushes. I also did awful in school. When I say awful I mean I had like a B average. I have no idea why, but all of a sudden I didn’t care about my grades. My parents had no idea, I confiscated all my report cards. They still don’t know, so don’t tell them.
Sophomore year of high school was a little harder for me. I had a year of acne and for an adolescent that is worse than death. I was traumatized but it made me go more inward, I started to read a lot more, I didn’t, however, improve my grades yet. It was in Juinor year that I realized that if I didn’t get my act together, I was not going to a decent college and my parents would slaughter me.
So I started to care about my school work and I started to get mostly A’s. I still struggled in math but one semester I did get all A’s. I also started to change as a person. I started to become more politically aware, I became a feminist, and I was very liberal in my views. I also started to read our religious scripture a little bit. It gave me peace.
Senior year of high school was a blast. That was the best time I had in school since I was a kid. I again did not care about my grades because I already got into a good college and they didn’t look at your senior grades. I wrote controversial articles in our school newspaper, I read a lot of newspapers, magazines, and books. I discovered that I loved to read and write. I was also in Creative Writing and was head of the Literary Journal that we were putting together.
College was amazing. That was definitely some of the best years of my life. I did well in most of my classes but did horrible in math once again. I majored in English and was rejected from the Undergraduate Creative Writing program, but my writing was taking off in its own way. I made some good friends, drank a little too much sometimes, and just had fun in general. I also loved my classes. I took a lot of interesting classes like The Psychology of Literary Criticism and Lesbian Literature.
After I graduated from The University of Michigan, I took a year off and went to Washington D.C. I got a job as a temp, basically working as a secretary in different offices. It was very uninspiring and became depressing after a while. I had a boyfriend, then I decided to end it with him by moving back home. I spent three months preparing a 30-page sample of writing to get into a Creative Writing graduate school. I got into Columbia and was ecstatic.
Grad school was a trip. Quite literally. I was diagnosed with Manic Depression or Bipolar Disorder and had a long manic episode my first semester there. Second semester I suffered from severe depression and my writing suffered as well. But the next year I sprang out of my lull and started having a lot of fun with new and exciting people and my writing was breaking new grounds I was told.
Then after school was over, I had another manic episode that led me to be hospitalized for a while and I ended up back in Michigan. I spent the next ten years pretty much depressed. There were high points to this decade of my life, my thirties basically, but a lot of it I spent suffering. I did, however, meet the woman that is still my best friend to this day and she really helped me get through this trying time of my life. We had so much laughter and she introduced to me to some very brilliant people and in that regard, it was all very good for me.
I have been forty for three years now. I managed to get out of my depression for good I hope these past eight months. It has been a lot of work, but it has been the best thing I ever did for myself. The way I got out of depression was through meditating, writing and becoming physically healthy. I am more content, not happier but more content than I have ever been in my life.
I am happy but perhaps my life is not as exciting as it was in my twenties, but I think I can make it exciting again. Right now I am working on keeping the peace first. Thank you for coming with me on this mental journey through my life. I’m not sure why I wanted to tell this particular story, but I guess I wanted to see what this journey would look like myself.
nina