“Tell me what company you keep, and I will tell you what you are!” Who even made that quote anyway? If I had a dollar for every time I heard it or something close to it, I’d be a…thousandaire!
My mother would say, “birds of a feather flock together.” I didn’t care as a teenager because as popular teen drama shows taught all of us, high school is all about cliques. I don't know who officially made it the rule, but we all followed it. I started high school in a swarm of freshmen, but by sophomore year everyone had been properly distributed. You had your popular girls, nerds, jocks, and a group of kids who may or may not have had a drug problem.
My lunch table every day was full of basketball players. I won’t say “jocks" because although we played sports, we never slacked in the classroom. We were a bit taller than everyone else, a bit faster, the first to get picked in gym. We went everywhere together. That's how we survived four years in the jungle known as New York City Public Schools.
Of course, in any group, there’s a “culture,” or a code of conduct. Again, I don’t know who in the world makes these rules, but whether we knew it or not, we followed diligently. There were things that were seen as cool or uncool and I made sure I was on the “cool” side of the scale. Maybe I made it up in my head. But I definitely wasn’t going to test the waters to see a reaction.
I actually loved creating, writing, films, and music. But in the crew, you did what is necessary to stay “cool.” Nobody would want to hear my gospel music playlist anyway. Basketball! Class! Girls! Basketball! That's the language we spoke at all times. If you know that language, don’t try new words. That was my thought process, but I just didn’t know it at the time, because at 16, I thought I was living life how it was supposed to be lived.
I stuck to the blueprint all the way through to graduation. Then came college.
A new environment, with new people. I spent my first semester like a fish looking for a pond. But these waters were so unfamiliar that a fitting ecosystem was harder to come by.
On a random day in March of 2020. I sat in my geology class and heard murmuring swell through the lecture hall. "Pandemic,” "COVID-19," “school closed.” Everything changed after that day.
“Lockdown” is an interesting way to describe the year that followed.
“Tell me what company you keep, and I will tell you what you are” ... that's an interesting thought. The people around you may determine the kind of person you are, but then if those people are out of the picture, who are you really? Are you really being yourself, or is your personality or interests based off of what our surroundings tell us are acceptable?
These are the questions I asked myself daily. Everything that I thought defined me was outside in the infected air, so germs weren’t the only thing I was away from. But my former identity.
Alone in my bedroom for hours, my imagination began to run wild. The interests that I had developed in passing were now the only things I had to keep me occupied. Up to that point I had lived my life as a consumer of things that others created, but with all this time on my hands I thought, “maybe I can create something.”
As I opened my laptop and slapped the keys, the time around me transitioned from day and night, to just, existence. No morning, no evening, just computer on, or computer off.
With no outside world to limit the possibilities, my mind was opened to its creative abilities. Since falling in love with creating, I haven’t stopped. This period in time was not as much of a lockdown as it was a “cocoon” of some sort. Editing videos, taking pictures, blasting my music! That room became a place of serenity. Finding my own identity through creativity, prayer, and a nonexistent sleep schedule. “Cool” was whatever I wanted it to be, and it stays that way even now.
Now I have company that I keep, but they don’t determine who I am, because that was established when nobody was present to give input, only me. So now, the only way to know who I am is by asking me.
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