Fitting in

 Prompt: Think about the different people, cultures, experiences, communities, interests, and traditions that have shaped who you are. What parts of your identity have had the greatest influence on the person you are today? Have you ever felt pressure to change, hide, or emphasize a part of yourself in order to fit in?

I would say the parts of my identity that have had the greatest influence on the person I am today are my cultural background, I was born in Florida, my dad is a naturalized haitian immigrant, my mother a naturalized north indian-white guyanese immigrant. I grew up eating many different types of food, I grew up without a direct religion, being taught stories froms different cultures, etc. Being in a household where my mother was a pharmacist, my father a pharmacist, and my sister being in schooling to become a physicisian for almost all of my life from my memory, there's always been a heavy emphasis on biology, anatomy, and that includes what my dad taught me. Cartoons explaining red and white blood cells, the different organs of the body, etc. That's what lead me where I am today where I'm already studying for the NAPLEX in senior year of high school, applying for college to major in biochemistry. My culture itself is a mixing pot of many different walks of life and ethnicities. I absolutely rejected that at one point. Its confusing, its ostracizing, it makes you feel like you don't belong anywhere. It lead me to be lost for a very long time, where I tried to fit in with black kids, white kids, but could never truly fit. I was raised by "whitewashed" parents, but still sensible and reasonable people. I could have fun with so many different groups, but I was never *in* the group I was never *the same* as everyone around me. In middle school as I began to enter all-white friend groups, who were all pretty much racist and prejudiced in their views, even though they didn't know it yet, I began to feel a sense of self-hatred as a mixed young man. I began to wish I was white, and I wont mention much else because its very tender to me as a time, I was very lost. Even beyond that, it took so long to truly become un-prejudiced in my views. I spent those key years in middle school in a group where I was "one of the good ones" and not like "most black people" and it lead to a level of prejudice to my own race which is just heartbreaking and again very personal to me. It took until my 10th grade year, when I left that group, to realize that everyone is human. Men, women, black, white, asian, Latino, Indian, etc. It took so long to break free and realize that everyone is roughly the same as a person. They may have different cultural differences different foods maybe religions but throughout my life as i've interacted with an immense amount of people, races, etc. I learned that we are all pretty much the same especially when you live in a mixing pot like Atlanta. Maybe a guy uses AAVE, some people would immediately put on a level of prejudice and assume something of him, maybe that he's dumber etc. He probably has the same level of intelligence as everyone else. To remove that level of self-hatred to remove that level of prejudice was a long journey but when it made sense it made sense when I interacted with people outside of that horrible group it made sense so fast and it felt like finishing the tutorial in a video game. Reaching a level of maturity that some people never reach throughout their entire life.