(16, GA, USA) Aduwa - Their Perceptions VS. Mine

My entire life, I have always known who I was. When I was a baby, I knew I preferred formula to my mother’s milk. During childhood, I knew my favorite food was chicken and that my favorite color was black. As a teenager, I knew that my favorite way to style my hair was in an afro.

But just because I knew myself doesn’t mean other people did. I mean, yes, the people around me knew my name and my face. They knew that I wore big, nerdy glasses and had crooked teeth. They knew that I was in the tenth grade. Everyone knew that. But even fewer people knew me. My beliefs. My morals. Arguably, maybe even my personality. Only a few people, mostly my close friends and family, knew these more important aspects of my life.

But I wasn’t aware of how little people really knew me until one crazy event changed my life.

So, let’s start off with some background information. I had two friends. Let's call them Cole and Bea. I met Cole in sixth grade, while Bea became my friend in the middle of my freshman year. And while we were all fairly close, Cole and Bea were known for one thing: starting drama. At first, I didn’t have a problem with it. I ignored all the red flags in our friendship: the lying, the gaslighting, the jokes that weren’t really just jokes but disrespect disguised as jokes, the fact that they would actively seek out problems with other people and start drama. I ignored all of it until I couldn’t anymore. Eventually, I’d had enough, and we fell out. Good riddance.

But unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. Not even close.

After I fell out with Cole and Bea, more and more things started happening. I began getting dirty looks, snickering while walking past me, and hearing about them trash-talking me to other people. Months passed, and eventually, in December of my sophomore year, they did something even worse: they spread a rumor about me. A bad one.

At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, I got a text message from my best friend, Reese. And Reese, oh, Reese was mad. Apparently, Cole and Bea had taken it upon themselves to start an entire rumor about Reese and me, claiming that he was cheating on his girlfriend with me. Obviously, this rumor was a hundred percent false, as I would never do that, because Reese’s girlfriend also happened to be another one of my best friends. Additionally, homewrecking just wasn’t my forte. I mean, do you know how many men there are in the world?

Unfortunately, there were people who believed Cole and Bea’s lies. And because of that, it caused them to develop some negative perceptions of me: that I was a homewrecker, a girl who thrived off drama. Some people stopped talking to me and started talking more about me. For a while, I felt hurt and extremely lonely. Because no matter how much I defended myself, there were always people who didn’t believe me. For the next couple of months, going to school brought me severe stress and depression. It was incredible how Cole and Bea could make me feel ashamed of something that had never even happened.

But at some point, I remembered something, something that helped me heal: They didn’t know me. Because anyone who truly knew me knew good and well that homewrecking was simply not something that Aduwa did. So anytime I would hear someone else claim I did something that I didn’t, I would repeatedly tell myself, “they didn’t know me.”

But do you know who knew me the best? I did. I knew that my favorite color was black and that my favorite way to style my hair was in an afro. But most importantly, I knew what I thought of myself. I knew my morals and my beliefs. My thoughts and my actions. What I did and didn’t do. I knew myself better than anyone else on this earth, and that was all I cared about.

So, it doesn’t matter what others think. It doesn’t matter what they say. Because at the end of the day, a person who sees themselves clearly cannot be shaken by other people’s negative perceptions.