Entry 4 – I Believe…

Reach for the Sky

My name is Santiago Hernandez; I have gone through the same hardships as most teens my age. I live in a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood where gang violence is nearly unheard of. My family makes enough money to pay off our two-story house. My parents are bright and vibrant examples of a stable and loving marriage. To be very frank, I’m probably luckier than most teens my age.

I was bullied just as much as the next nerd, thankfully I was never beaten. I wasn’t a picture of physical health to my peers and I wasn’t nearly as firm as they were which made me an easy target. My bullies gave me hell; a day almost never went by without someone joking about how nerdy or fat I was. Well, at the very least it was better than the stares I’d sometimes receive from the taller guys; they looked at me as if I was something feeble. I tried to hold my ground, but what could I ever do when a pack of behemoths stood over me like lions taking a kill from a cheetah. There wasn’t anything I could do. I never told my parents because I felt that I’d disappoint them, that I wasn’t strong enough to handle something as simple as a few frank remarks; that’s all it ever was, just a lot of really dumb guys making irrelevant points about me. However, it felt like carrying one textbook and then having like 10 more added on top of the one you were carrying.

As a result, I developed a very low self-esteem that is still doing somewhat poorly today due to those old memories, but that isn’t new. After all, all teens have a low self-esteem at some point of their teenage hood and chances are most of them have been bullied too. I know how it feels like to be isolated by your own peers just like so many others. For as long as I can remember, my lack of physical fitness and my inability to hold my ground and stand up to those who’d bully me caused me to begin to think that perhaps I was a waste. Eventually, I felt like less of a man and I, like many shy people, kept it buried within me, thus causing an internal conflict of catastrophic proportions to erupt inside of me, but I’m pretty sure that everyone goes through that kind of thing at some point too.

I’m no special case. In fact, my life has been one without true hardship, which is a great blessing. However, I desperately wanted to test my character against something truly daunting, so I could prove to myself that perhaps I’m not a waste after all. Then it clicked in my head: reach for the sky. All these years I have always been described as an excellent student. That’s what distinguished me, that is what gave me a purpose: a reason to fight my way out of hell. That moment was my first life lesson: forget your past, but remember who you were so that you can improve on that person. It turned out that what I needed was a purpose and that purpose was that I needed to do something awesome, obviously not flying, but either way something spectacular. With that being said, I’m continuing to reach for the sky: while standing on my toes and with my arms and hands stretched. Aiming to do something great gives my life true purpose, this I believe.

Click here to listen to the audio recording.