This is AbovetheInfluence.com Podcast #5
Hi, It’s Lisa from Washington, DC - Jen’s back with us today. Here she talks about making friends and how she got through the tough times at home.
Getting through high school was hard sometimes and easy other times, you know, just like everyone else I had my ups and down. But fortunately I had my sister and my grandmother who were always there. They were great emotional backers. My grandma is an amazing woman. And I look up to her in so many ways. She raised five kids on her own and she always worked, so I worked all the way through high school and I found that I could find independence on my own if I started making my own money and I could do things that I wanted to do with the money I made.
I knew some kids because I went to the school previously, like four years ago I went to the school, but then I came back after four years and you know everyone’s got their group of friends and I’m sitting there trying to get back into the clusters of the high school cliques. So I’d sit there and try to make conversation but a lot of the times the things they talk about are different, or I’d sit there sometimes and I wouldn’t know what to say in certain situations, and people are really on the edge of their seats about trying to talk to different people.
I really feel that in high school you really care a lot about image and the people you hang out with and that other people see you hanging out with a person. So a lot of time I wasn’t the person people wanted to talk to, so a lot of the time I would sit alone at lunch and that was uncomfortable but I found that if you don’t care about sitting by yourself at lunch, like if you don’t care if you’re alone…if you find that you can just be comfortable in your own skin and comfortable just doing it, or just doing whatever you want to on your own and be independent in your own way, that people will feed off of that and they will recognize that there’s something about you that doesn’t necessarily throw them off, but alludes some sort of confidence. People I think kind of envy/admire that in people, they wish they could be independent like that.
I know a lot of kids in high school who couldn’t even go to the grocery store or shopping with someone else, and it’s okay to be alone, there’re nothing wrong with that. I think that’s kind of like taboo sometimes to people is to be alone, but in reality, in high school people don’t remember what you wore or what you said at lunch or if you said no to drinking or smoking or whatever. People don’t remember because they are so focused on themselves and what they’re saying or doing that they don’t remember, so it’s ‘no worries’ At least now I think that, it’s like one of those, ‘I wish I knew that when I was younger.’
Heh, It’s Lisa again and I’m signing off for today. The next two episodes are from Jen but email us and let us know if you have any ideas for your own podcast. Tell us what you’d talk about and why you’re Above the Influence.