Talking about a popular or famous girl alone, in general, describes someone who is good-looking and fashionable. Whereas to be a good example for others will requisite some sort of achievement. Therefore, I want to share my story today about how someone like me who was out of a skirt from fashion was able to gain fame in school and community. I hope some people out there who do not have enough confidence in what they are capable of could stand up, keep going on their dream and work on them despite where we come from or obstacles because our future is not determined by what we are today. 👊
Many people said I had no friends, no boyfriend, a quiet and shy girl who had never blended with others yet in reality, it was conversely. The reason why they made an assumption was that simply those people were not in my circle and had never engaged in any of my activities. Although they were family members or claimed my relatives, considering the distance of their houses only from 1 KM up to 2 KM, they rarely came to my father's house even during the festive season. If it was not for my father's sake, I would rather visit my friends than pleased those people. Keeping my relationship with them wasn't worth it because the ones who supported and lent me hands were my friends and their family member. Take one example, my friend in my third year of the secondary school gave me a picture of which city I could go to study in; after graduated from high school while many family or relatives objected to my father's decision to send me to university in the famous city in education, I went to my destination with friends and searched for university information with them. Moreover, my friend's family member helped me to settle down in the unfamiliar city. In a sort word, even though we had the same blood in our bodies, the fact is that those were only a bunch of stranger people. Another reason was that I spent most of the day in school, in school clubs, joined school activities, studied with schoolmates after school, engage in community activities, and worked to earn some money to support my school and personal necessities. Because of those scramble schedules, you could say my life wasn't fun at all; my day wasn't a typical day, and my life wasn't like regular preteens or teenagers either. Unlike other preteens or teenagers who had always congregated without purpose as mostly villager children drop out (mainly only hold primary school certificates) and absolutely did nothing for the entire day; they had plenty of time to poke around. Some others may be students too, however, they were not interested in school things and chose to hang out without a positive aim. In another word, most of my friends were schoolmates who were from another village and friends from work. As I managed to get into the best school in the village and kept continuing my study I went further and farther while many children in my community grew and stayed in the same place, interacting with the same people. My interest, my social life, my mindset, my goal, my habits, et cetera, all of them made me different from others. Thus, a high wall and barrier had been created by those things and they were not able to reach my world. My big dream led me into a certain world.
It was a hard time when my father lost his decent job because at the time I must to adapt to a new environment in secondary school and had no idea who was my new friends. My appearance was less and less flattering and easily noticed that I came from a low-income family; had a low-quality uniform, and carried a regular school bag and shoes that were sold in any shop in the market. Moreover, at home, my outfit was horrible because I had never renewed my clothes since my father lost everything. Furthermore, my skin got darker each day and dull as in my first year of secondary school I also collected grass in the field nearby to feed my father's goats without proper protection from the soaring sun and had never taken care of my skin, face, and hair properly as I only afforded a cheaper body lotion and put the lowest price of powder on my face. To hold a pretty title, a girl in my hometown had to have black shiny hair with fair skin, be taller, and be fashionable from toe to hair which I was not in any of those possessions because I was like a walking skull, too skinny, my hair color wasn't black, and I did not grow tall either. I mentioned in another article, that in Secondary school where mostly my primary school girlfriends grew taller and good-looking girls, I was just a skinny little girl with dull skin. At this point, I was supposed to be an easy target for bullying at school and community. But, on the contrary, I became a well-known and respected student at school. On top of that, I was a role model in the community where my father's house had stood. Because of this reason, my name preceded me. How I managed to gain it, well, the answer is advancements! It was not easy but it was worth it to fight for!👍
Despite all the difficulties that I had to face, I decided to embrace and endure them in order to help my father to get back his dignity. I might mention before that my father got humiliation by his own colleagues. They did everything including bribing the judge, the investigator, and the police, disappearing the evidence, bringing fake witnesses, and the ultimate thing was threatening his family life in this case my future. The only reason why my father dropped the case after a year worked hard on it was because of this bunch of cowardly people used me as a shield. If you do not believe that evil does exist, for now, you must rethink what you thought as evil walks among us and they are human like us. They set up my father in order to kick my father permanently from not only his position but crushed him until no hope. Because of this reason, I set a high dream to shut them up. Therefore, instead of feeling ashamed as our lives turned upside down, I endeavoured to reach my goal. My goal was clear and I knew what I had to do. Determination with the massive effort led me to become a bold girl, at least that was what I had believed for years.
Looking back in my first year of secondary school, for weeks, someone in my class had always made fun of me for instance saying unpleasant things. But, after the first quarter, he retreated as my performance in academics surged rapidly and got acknowledgment from teachers in the school and many admired me. As a result, I had been trusted to correct my classmates' regular exams in one particular subject. The teacher delegated this work to me, yeah I was like a teacher's assistant.😉 Furthermore, I had been pointed to becoming the class's finance including the secretary. Basically, each class had the president of the class, vice president, secretary, and finance. Those positions had a distinct duty. My duty as finance was that anything related to money was my job to manage. However, I do not recall why my job in the first year of secondary school doubles as secretary of the class as well.🤔 If one of the teachers did not come because of family or other reasons, my duty was to lead my classmates to write resumes from the textbooks or it could be an assignment. So, I stood in front of the class and wrote on the blackboard with white chalk to guide my classmates, yeah, particularly like a teacher. Although without a teacher in the class, my class was still quiet and behaved. As far as I remember, my class became a good example for other classes. I had kept my finance or secretary of the class until my third year in secondary school in spite of my academics falling down in the second year. One event that caught many students was that my mark on another particular subject in the second year outraced the smartest students in school. Therefore, it kept me on the line as one of the respected students and got acknowledgment from students that came from the upper class in the community. From there I made friends with some of them. The bottom line of this story is that, instead of feeling down and pulling myself from society, I was able to stand out among the crowd and tried my best I can do whether in academics or outside academics. What does it mean outside academics? There were a bunch of school activities that could expose our talent and capability, and the important thing was to find new friends. Take examples: I took a challenging performance as nobody did not have the courage to try, or it could be in art and music; at least I can sing and draw. Unfortunately, the secondary school did not have a choir club so I joined another performance in dance sport; joined force with students from different classes in the competition and we won the first prize! Besides exposing myself in the performance I was good at baking and handicrafts too. I do still remember one day in my second year of Secondary school, we had a baking assignment or project using cassava. While others including the smartest students made simple regular snacks that villagers made at home, I come up with the idea to create a cake with cassava flour made from scratch. My group member was thrilled because this task was successful. No one had made a fluffy cake by using cassava flour as one of the ingredients before. So, it was a huge accomplishment!🤗
What about my relationship and how did I manage to make a friend? I was not the kind of person who likes to please others in order to get close to people, even until these days. Indeed, for basic courtesy, whenever I met a new individual I greeted them. However, getting close to me was challenging especially for boys. The reason was that I was recognized as a smart girl surrounded by a number of friends (and they were loyal friends). Only the male students with certain levels (excellent in one or some subjects or any achievement) had the confidence to get close to me. In another word, average male students and non-students had never chanced into my circle since I had a penchant for studying and had spent most of my time in school; in high school, I was off for school at 6:15 am and got home around 4 pm (but in school clubs; I had gotten home at around 5:30 pm). As I mentioned earlier that I had gone further and farther as I kept continuing my school. I think because of this reason some people made an assumption that I was a girl who had no boyfriend and friends; in their view, I had always been at home and never seen me hanging out around. Thinking back about it, I was not interested in romance and preferred friends rather than having a boyfriend because the right friends would give me benefits such as information about universities, cities, living outside our region, and anything that I did not know about education fields. Once again, since my dream was big, I needed to collect information as much as I can to support my goal.
Indeed, considering that I was not a pretty and fashionable girl, getting friends was virtually impossible. But it was not my case, I had never offered others anything (I did not have money to buy snacks or gifts for my friends) yet they were willing to trust me and comfortable with me. I had a story when I was in high school, even though I talkless person yet recognized as a leader for small group students (students from the same village as me). One day the smartest student in high school approached me in an unfriendly manner when I went to the restroom. She asked me whether the total record of my academic report outpaced hers. Until today, I failed to figure out how I looked intimidating to others, and sometimes, for some, I was like their rival. On top of that, I became the center of attention in school; mostly knew me but I did not know them all. The question is what exactly did I do to gain relationships, and how did I have loyal friends, particularly someone like me famous in school? The answer is that "treat people like you want to be treated." Respecting others and never underestimating people; are those principles that I hold. Indeed, I was a quiet girl but that meant quiet was not shy. "Quiet" meant that I wasn't interested in other business; I did not like gossiping, bad mount others, busybody, drama queen, et cetera. I interacted with other students in school at first because of the same interests for instance martial art club, sports, floral surroundings, music, some subjects, handicrafts, and so on. Fortunately, I liked so many things so that made me a likable person. Sometimes, even the smartest students did not get respect like I was, or they were not popular enough because their behavior and manner were bad which made them hated by others, or some did not join any school performances or school club that could meet literally new people and extends the connection; to expose what we could do and show it. In high school, I managed to get involved in three major performances. yeah many of them (smartest students) stayed in their comfort zone as they had believed that none of those things mattered. Well, everyone has their own goal, right? What I did was had tried my best to reach my dream.
Besides the same interest to make a friend, it was easy to meet new friends in the workplace. Of course, because working in the same place, I became their friend despite our different goals. Some of my friends in the workforce range from 6 years old kids to young adults and mid-age adults. You bet, while working packaging snacks, we talked about customers' complaints, how to improve the snack taste to meet consumer desires, simulate the cost of the product so that the business kept running, the inflation that affected the cost of living and hit the business, and many adult issues. So, I was like in the economics class.😅 You guess why I chose to study economics.🤔😁Yeah, the business owner had always opened discussions daily with his employees in order to improve his business. Remembering those days, they were excellent villagers, they acted like the CEO'S company; their ideas, and solutions, managing unhappy customers, reputation, how competing and cooperative with rivals, and budgeting, were remarkable! You won't believe that my boss was a teenager; at 16 years old bought a house and opened a business. Even though the house was a 500 sqm bamboo house with a soil floor, he saved some money for years while working as a laborer after primary school to buy his own house. That is amazing, right? In addition, my adult friends were stretched by working at two different places. No wonder, I was well-known in the community since I was a hard-working girl and studied hard at school at the same time. For that reason, I became a role model for the young generation in the community. At this point, you bet, some children in the range age 5 to 8 years old followed me around when I was at home; asked me to teach them to wrap the gift, made handicrafts together, or just watched me draw. It was silly when someone asked them why they tagged along with me, their answer was that "she is our queen." I wonder what happened to them after I left my hometown to study. I heard some managed to study at a famous school on another island and got a good job, others? I do not know. Those days were amazing! The greatest of my joy is to share my spirit to keep studying at school and get degrees no matter what it takes even though tomorrow is doom day, I would keep working on my dream; that is my spirit. Yeah, many villager children in my hometown were talented and had huge potential. However, I could not do anything and was hopeless as I, myself, was struggling each day to survive. So, if you are following Ichikraft Give and Care articles and relate them to my stories you could easily notice my motive why I have tried to assist villager children even though only some of them. Today only some, but who knows when someday I hold the highest degree in education which lead me to an occupation with a great perk; my hands would reach a number of villager children. Crazy? Yeah, I have always had the craziest dream.
Meanwhile, in the community, I was active in particular interests and often did volunteer. Washing the community carpet was one of the tasks I did at the time, and when the community held an event for youth I participate in it as a host. Although at first, I did not have any experience, adults helped and taught me. My intention just wanted to help and be useful in the community where I lived. Occasionally when one of the residents held an event, without hesitation if I had time I assisted them; it could be serving food, helping cook et cetera. I mentioned in another article that I did a baking job to help one of my neighbors without payment. In return, I went home with 250 g- 300 g of cookies daily which was enough to make me happy because my brother loved cookies. In my mind, 300 g cookies would cost me IDR 25,000 which was almost the same as my total salary in a month because on average I earned IDR 28,000 for a month. In my calculation, helping this business was just worth it and I had never complained about anything.
You can say, my friends came from a wide range of ages with a range of interests; there were from my school and other schools, workplace, younger ages, the same age, young adults, adults, and even the elderly, whether they clever or average as long they had the same interests and even I made a friend with a disability girl; those were my friends' backgrounds. Despite my appearance, who care about it since many of my friends looked at me as someone who worked hard to achieve something, had never bothered others, and never looked down on somebody else. It just simply says that what I did to gain trust and respect was "treat people like we want to be treated." Indeed, I had experienced some unpleasant events, for instance, one of my friends avoided me because I was not fit anymore in her circle. Another event was on my first day in high school, I got rejected by a girl who looked fashionable. However, none of those mattered to me because I had believed only accomplishment would prove who we are and what we can do; whether in academics or outside academics. Appearance? It is just a matter of time to transform. Education will lead us to be decent people, right? Including improving our appearance. Never feel out of the blue if you get a rejection, just keep going and work on your dream. Even, recently, I got this kind of rejection to make a friend. This person sees me only as a housewife with a lower profession (making cat collars and handmade flowers) compared to her who holds a master's degree and professional work. My reaction was just to move on.😎
And of course, during those few years, there were still some people who were unhappy with me for some reason. Whatever their reason wasn't my issue. Being a well-known and respected person in school and the community would create jealousy in others. However, I just ignored it and kept going and showing what I was capable of. Because if I took their bait I might pull off myself from society, and as result, end up being bullied by others. This is the main reason why I wanted to share my story in this article. Although we live in the 21st century, either in a big city or a tiny village, bullying is everywhere, especially in school. So, if you are a bullied target, then stand up. Instead of taking the baits, you must figure out what best you can do; it could be in one of the school's subjects, physical activity (P.A), joining the club that you are interested in, or being active in the community where you live. Do not ever pull yourself from society and find friends through the same interests. If you do so, you will be able to achieve something, eventually, you might be able to be a well-known person in school and in your community like I was. So, do not easy to give up because this world is big and there are many things that we have to explore!👊🔥
Note:
- Written by Acik Mardhiyanti
- Do not copy this article without permission
