Out of My Comfort Zone
OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE
One first impression people have of me is that I’m very quiet and reserved … which is true.My general tendency has always been to keep to myself and speak when spoken to. One story that my mother likes to tell about me is about my first day in preschool when I was only about 3 years old. She came to pick me up and the teachers were very concerned and said, “She was very good, but she only played by herself. She didn’t interact with any of the other kids. Is she ok?” To which my mother replied, “Yes, that’s just how she is”. I didn’t talk much as a kid and at one point, I think my mother was even concerned that I might not talk at all. I have a cousin who is a few months older than me, and the story that I’ve heard is that when we were younger she decided to take advantage of the fact that I didn’t talk and decided to bully me when no adult was in the room. My mother says I went into the next room where she and the other adults were, pointed at my cousin and said, “She hit me”, and those were my first official words. I think they were all surprised and relieved that I actually could talk, except for my cousin, who got in trouble for hitting me.
Throughout elementary school I was still pretty quiet and generally kept to myself. Most of my teachers remembered me as the “quiet girl with the two pigtails”, because that was how my mother always did my hair – in two pigtails on either side of my head. In junior high and high school I was basically remembered as the “quiet girl with the ponytail”, because by then I had graduated from two pigtails to a single ponytail down my back, and as you can see, I haven’t changed that much.
But when people get to know me they are a bit surprised to find that I can be loud, opinionated, and quite talkative. Get me going on one of my favorite topics and I can go into full “geek” mode, boring you with random facts and trivia for hours on end. One of my favorite topics to talk about is the story of the ‘60s
One first impression people have of me is that I’m very quiet and reserved … which is true.My general tendency has always been to keep to myself and speak when spoken to. One story that my mother likes to tell about me is about my first day in preschool when I was only about 3 years old. She came to pick me up and the teachers were very concerned and said, “She was very good, but she only played by herself. She didn’t interact with any of the other kids. Is she ok?” To which my mother replied, “Yes, that’s just how she is”. I didn’t talk much as a kid and at one point, I think my mother was even concerned that I might not talk at all. I have a cousin who is a few months older than me, and the story that I’ve heard is that when we were younger she decided to take advantage of the fact that I didn’t talk and decided to bully me when no adult was in the room. My mother says I went into the next room where she and the other adults were, pointed at my cousin and said, “She hit me”, and those were my first official words. I think they were all surprised and relieved that I actually could talk, except for my cousin, who got in trouble for hitting me.
Throughout elementary school I was still pretty quiet and generally kept to myself. Most of my teachers remembered me as the “quiet girl with the two pigtails”, because that was how my mother always did my hair – in two pigtails on either side of my head. In junior high and high school I was basically remembered as the “quiet girl with the ponytail”, because by then I had graduated from two pigtails to a single ponytail down my back, and as you can see, I haven’t changed that much.
But when people get to know me they are a bit surprised to find that I can be loud, opinionated, and quite talkative. Get me going on one of my favorite topics and I can go into full “geek” mode, boring you with random facts and trivia for hours on end. One of my favorite topics to talk about is the story of the ‘60s