How I Feel About Being A "Statistic"

I'm sitting here after dinner in my dorm, sipping on a glass of wine and munching on some two-frank cheese, as a third year student who left everything to move to Switzerland and dead ass is daring herself to stay for the rest of her college career (at least). The past few weeks have been absolutely life changing, in the aspect that they have been difficult, eye-opening, and hella fun.

I have never been able to find a true tribe back at home. I have found individual friends who are down to travel, go hiking, try new things, take those crazy spontaneous trips that everyone rave about... but not many people actually live up to what they say they will do? I am finally finding a circle of friends who are always down for that sort of thing, no matter what the destination is, or how we get there. We aren't obligated to hang together 24/7 either, we can do our own thing, but at the end of the day we all have the same goal... travel more, love harder, meet more people, and become better.

I've also had amazing conversations with these people, who come from all walks of life. We talk about how we grew up, where we came from, what kind of experiences we had, and maybe even how it shaped us as people. I've met people from all over the world, like my friend Aakash from India, who hasn't ever had western style bread, or my friend Mark from the UK, who hasn't experienced Chick-Fil-A (SOUTHERN PPL KNOW).

It has only been three-ish weeks, and I've learned a ton about myself and how I think about certain situations. For example, how I came from such a shit childhood and I somehow made it here... to "success."

My childhood was okay, it had a lot of rough spots. My family was hit really hard by the recession, because my parents invested a lot in the housing market. No one who was average and middle-class saw 2008 coming. The housing market wasn't the best place to be when everything came crashing down. For the next 12 years, we struggled financially, and emotionally to stay together as a good family. I won't get into a detail, it can be a lot to process.

My parents are also foreign, so it automatically makes me foreign (especially in The South). I AM first-generation American, by the way. BUT, people looked at me like I was some sort of weirdo, because Polish was my first language, my face structure wasn't the same as everyone else's, and my parent's didn't really "get" American culture, like cookouts, and football. At the same time, they would say, "Oh my god, that is so cool! Say something in Polish!" Really? Oh. My god. Fuck off. Literally ask Siri to do it for you. They all automatically profiled me to be a certain way.

I was embarrassed. For a long time. I was embarrassed of the culture I came from, the language I spoke, the people who I was related to. I actually refused to speak Polish to my family for a year or two when I was younger because I was too scared not to fit into a middle school environment. Of course, this was just part of growing up, all pre-teens and teenagers process things in a weird way because we are trying to figure out what the fuck we're about. I eventually ended up realizing that I had something special, and I was extremely lucky to have experienced something unique culturally. I was also lucky to be bilingual.

Whats crazy to me, is that everyone I have ever met has had their own story like this. My high school life was INSANE. I think about it sometimes these days, and I honestly don't know how I handled that kind of stress at 15/16 years old. The amount of emotional trauma I had to process should have really fucked me up long-term. I mean, I guess it kind of did, but not as badly as I thought it would. I kept fighting. Somehow I was determined that I WOULD NOT BECOME A STATISTIC. I didn't want to be one of those girls pregnant early in life, dropping out of school or her career, working a low-wage job, just because statistically I was supposed to end up like that. Just because I am a woman, a minority, from a low-income household, doesn't meant I can't find success. I had determination. My quality of life has increased immensely since I went to college, but it's because I made it so.

So, recently I had this revelation. Absolutely no one has to be a statistic. It might sound like a little of a conspiracy theory, but I think that those stats we see are meant to scare us. They are boxes put around us, no matter who we are, that limit what we can be (or should be). Whether we are women, black, gay, foreign, white, etc. A lot of us have a ton of pressure to be a certain way whether those expectations are low or high.

Anyways. I absolutely thing that the biggest lie we have told our youth is that they don't have a great chance at making a better life for themselves if their socioeconomic status is low. FIGHT. It's YOUR life. Make it better. It's 100% possible. You have to pave your own path and fight for whatever you fucking want. If you really want something, you will do anything to get there and you WILL work hard.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I want to use my fucked up life as an example to motivate people. I wasn't supposed to go to a 4-year university to get an education. I wasn't supposed to study abroad. I wasn't supposed to make more than 20-30k a year. My chances of being arrested are higher because my income is lower. My chances of alcoholism are higher than most, but then again, isn't that for most of our generation these days? Maybe that is the one thing we are on the same page about. Why is it that no one addresses that we are all messed up, traumatized, and only know how to drink or smoke it away? Yeah, yeah things like the opioid crisis and obesity is explicit, but no one talks about the underground.

We are the generation who grew up experiencing 9/11 and the aftermath that is still continuing. Now our generation is at the age where we can go fight that war. We are living through climate change fuckery and I feel like not many people are doing enough about it. If our environment deceases, we don't have very much left, now do we? We have an extreme divide building in the United States because of Trumpism. There are children being killed by gun violence in our schools and on the street. These poor babies can't fight because they are so young, so how are we supposed to build a future for ourselves?

Even though the world seems like its falling apart, and we can barely control anything, we can still pave that way for our own life because we can control our OWN actions. Those actions can make a difference, it doesn't matter on what scale... It's kind of the only thing we can control. In the end, its our experience and our relationships that matter to us. I know it's so difficult to keep owning our identity in this kind of world, we want to fit in, and allow our quality of life to go up, we want our planet to not fall apart... all at the same time. Even though it seems like we live in a shit-show of a world, we can make our own lives better.

We have to work harder, choose aspirations, strive for them, keep going, don't stop, reach those goals, find more things to strive for, and KEEP EVOLVING. Don't stop improving. It DOES NOT matter where you come from. You can improve your life if you simply try and keep trying every time the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Don't be a statistic. Be exceptional. All these tides seem like they are against every single one of us, but we will not be the generation who gives up. We are the generation who will fight.

-jules