I’m in school at 10 years old and I’m just playing outside, watching the older kids play football…
one of them comes up to me and says:
This is your Instagram right? Why are you called Blacklegend1379?
And I answer:
Umm, because it sounds cool?
and they say…
But… but you’re black? Don’t you get it?
…
Wait…
Ohh is that what being “black” means?
I never thought about it that way
I’m mixed but up until then I hadn’t really thought about myself as black or white…
I was just me.
We all laugh about it afterwards, they were mostly curious.
Looking back at this a decade later…
that tiny moment feels a lot stranger to me now.
I’m at home and we have guests coming over…
my mother greets them by saying:
Hello, hello! Welcome in welcome in!
I’m hiding behind my mother like there’s a monster in front of me haha…
Oh Alex, he’s just a bit shy! He will warm up!
I want to talk to them but…
It takes a minute for me to warm up to new people, but they seem nice!
Although I’m shy…
and then with my friends I’m always the quietest kid whenever we meet some other kids our age…
I let my friends do the talking, and I just greet them and observe.
…
I’m in school and I get an A in English…
Wow, you’re so smart Alex!
and I agree, I’m really good at English… I feel smart.
But then I go to my art class…
and see my grades…
I get a D.
My art teacher says:
Yeah Alex, you have potential but you just aren’t there yet.
Wait, I’m not so smart?
Or maybe… I’m smart but I need to be creative to do well in art…
maybe I’m not creative.
I’m sitting in front of my desk at home, I’m supposed to do my homework…
but it’s soo boring…
I can’t…
how long has it been?
10 minutes.
Ahh let me just take a short break and then I’ll get serious…
I lay in bed and start watching anime and YouTube shorts.
…
Oh no, I didn’t manage to do my homework tonight!
Why can’t I just be normal and study…
the smart kids study for hours at a time. Am I just unfocused? Lazy?
Or maybe… I’m just stupid.
…
My mother comes downstairs in the middle of the night…
I see her walking towards me with drowsy eyes…
Alex, you’ve been practicing on the piano for 7 hours?!
Oh wait, it has been a while… I just wanted to play a bit on the piano to get a better grade in music…
but I’ve almost learnt the entirety of the piece River Flows in You and so I barely noticed how much time went by.
Then my mother says:
Wow Alex, you’re so smart!
The same kid who couldn't focus for ten minutes could focus for seven hours. So “lazy” or “stupid” couldn't explain the whole person.
But one thing my friends always told me was how weird I was…
When I was growing up my mother described me as:
Extremely happy, always cheerful… helping people and talking to everyone.
But slowly over the years I start to take other people’s opinion of me very personally.
…
I’m 12 years old in school and I’m laughing and playing around with my friends… I have so much energy that I just have a lot to say and would usually wrestle with my friends all the time… even though I would always lose.
but then they tell me:
Alex, you’re so weird haha!
usually I would just let it go, I mean me being weird is me being myself.
but okay maybe I should just try to be normal for now… let me try it…
so the next break comes after class and…
I’m sitting with my friends and we’re just looking at our phones… barely anybody is saying anything and we’re just looking at memes and such.
I’m quiet and I try to match my friends energy almost perfectly.
…
But the very next day I’m wrestling around with my friends and just laughing it off, and then my friends would tell me that I’m weird.
Oh, yeah… I forgot I’m supposed to be normal.
…
As I got older, I started doing this more.
If something about me felt too weird, too loud, too different…
I tried turning it down.
and I just try to pretend to be like everyone else until school is finished… I don’t want to get bullied because I’m the smallest kid, so being normal is a very good thing.
So I got pretty good at trying to look normal.
But I found another word to describe myself with:
behind.
I’m 14 and I’m looking at other kids a bit older than me at school…
and I watch YouTube videos about young adults and they are rich… successful… and they seem to have everything going for them.
Meanwhile I look at my life…
My mother leaves work at 4 am in the morning when it’s dark… and comes home exhausted when it’s dark again…
and my focus on my homework and school has steadily declined…
I still manage to get good grades despite not studying… but I can’t be focused, I can’t work hard like the smart kids, I can’t be normal.
But if I become a computer engineer then people will respect me and I might earn a lot of money.
But I simply can’t, it will take too long. I will take a gap year from school and focus on making money as a gaming YouTuber. I will definitively not have a normal life. This is so fucked.
…
Years later… after dropping out of high school and finally helping to retire my mother…
Alex, I’m so proud of you… really, thank you!
And all of the sudden I don’t think about being behind.
All I care about is the smile my mother is showing me at this moment.
… I show a few people my YouTube channel:
Wow Alex, you’re so successful! And you’re only 18?!
You really are ahead and successful!
People were calling me successful now.
But there was one label I still completely believed:
I’m shy.
Then I went somewhere where nobody knew me.
I’m in South Africa with my father…
we are at this restaurant overlooking the sea and a lagoon…
There is this older couple who seems confused on what to order…
back at home I would’ve let them struggle and figure it out themselves, but let me just try talking to them.
Oh, wow thank you so much young man! What’s your name?
…
the sea and lagoon are completely overshadowed by darkness…
has it been this many hours?
I’ve been talking for so long my throat is starting to hurt.
Okay, I need to go in and pay, my dad is waiting for us to leave
…
Hello there! Haven’t seen you before!
Somebody at the cashier starts talking to me… I’m so happy I just tell them:
Oh yes, lovely country you have here! This is my first time in here!
Then all of the sudden I’m talking like a madman to them here…
I almost felt like the happy little kid when I was a young boy.
So where did the person who was shy go?
…
I see a lot of people who have the same skin complexion as me…
and I’m curious so I ask and they start saying:
Yeah, I think you are mostly colored or mixed…
Wait… I’m not black anymore?
Apparently here, people described me differently.
And suddenly I’m thinking about that kid at school again.
Black. Shy. Smart. Stupid. Weird. Successful.
Every word described something.
But none of them seemed able to describe all of me.
Years later, I’m more talkative, more expressive… and honestly, quite a bit weird again.
And I realized the labels weren’t necessarily wrong.
I was quiet sometimes.
I struggled to study.
I was weird.
The mistake was turning a description into a definition.
Quiet became shy.
Struggling became stupid.
Different became weird.
And once I believed those things about myself, I started behaving like they were true.
But the strangest part is…
I never felt like I was becoming someone else.
I thought I was discovering who I had always been.
I’m shy.
I’m lazy.
I’m weird.
And after enough years…
I barely remembered the kid who didn’t think about himself that way.
The kid who talked to everyone.
The kid who could spend seven hours at a piano.
The kid who could be weird without wondering what being weird said about him.
Those parts of me hadn’t necessarily disappeared.
I had just stopped using them as evidence of who I was.
And that makes me wonder how many parts of ourselves we forget…
not because they disappeared,
but because we found a word that seemed to explain us.
…
Because when I was 10, somebody told me I was black…
and I remember thinking:
Oh…
I never thought about myself that way.
I was just me.
Maybe growing up isn’t about finding the perfect word for who you are.
Maybe it’s realizing that no word was ever big enough.
I existed before I knew the word.