It’s not easy moving to a new state halfway through my high school career. Leaving friends, leaving home, leaving everything that I knew was one of the worst experiences I ever went through. BVSW is a bit smaller than where I came from, but never had I felt so dwarfed by the people around me. I was lonely, scared, intimidated and from my opinion, isolated from others. How was I, some junior from Ohio, supposed to find a way to merge in with the other kids in my class?
And, to be honest, I didn’t merge in.
Not at first.
It didn’t matter how I styled my hair or what I wore or what I said, there was always that feeling of being an outcast, but as the months passed and I grew more comfortable in the halls of Southwest, I grew more as my own person. Back in Ohio, always surrounded by my friends and what they liked and what was “right,” I never actually took the time to sit down and think ‘what do you want, Royan?’ Coming in to Southwest gave me the chance to re-examine myself and choose who I wanted to be. It gave me the opportunity to choose new hobbies, find out what I liked and to find out what I didn’t like (like touching). It’s cliche to say it but moving to Kansas changed my life, and even if I didn’t realize it before, it changed it for the better. I’m not going to spew lyrical comforts about how my life is A++ because I’m in Kansas and know who I am because I go through those days where I hate life, but those are only some days.
It’s not to say that it wasn’t hard to move to Kansas or that I don’t sometimes still miss Ohio, but moving to Kansas also prepared me for what I’m going to have to do later in life. It prepared me for college. As we all know, even if you’re just going to a college thirty minutes away, college means leaving your home, leaving most of your friends and starting over someplace new and while it seems daunting, it’s also a place to discover thyself and to re-define yourself. So if you’re reading this right now and are hating your life because you’re new to the Blue Valley District, don’t despair.
