Building who I am

I don’t remember much about my visits to my hometown of Trivandrum, India. As a child, all the details seemed to blur: faces, events, things that should’ve stuck.

Yet, I always remember the smells.

The scent of the airport filled me the moment I stepped off the jet bridge. The warm spice of the street air. The dusty comfort of my grandparents’ home.

For a long time, I wondered why the scent was the only thing that stayed with me. Now, I know that my memory only comes back in fragments, scattered moments that cling to us for reasons we don’t fully understand until later.

Little parts of my childhood, like those smells, held deeper meanings that didn’t click until I was older.

As the youngest of three girls, I was always treated like the baby of the family. I had a poor sense of what resilience was until early elementary school.

I used to take part in a club called Odyssey of the Mind as a child, where the competition consisted of a performance under different categories to portray a specific theme.

My team and I worked for weeks on an assignment to convey the theme of friendship without speaking a single line. We were kids, so we made props of emojis and our project communicated through “texting” on a prop phone. The phone was huge, taller than all of us. I spent nights crafting other props and working with my friends in hopes of winning.

Even though we worked so hard and I thought we should’ve won, we didn’t. Our team had won many tournaments before and not even placing had shocked me. I was taught that I couldn’t always have my way.

But not having my way taught me to get back up and fight even harder.

A few years later, I found myself learning something completely different. This time, I was learning things out of fascination.

In fourth grade, I learned to find peace during recess. I was never an athletic child and spent most of my time sitting around. One of my closest friends at the time introduced me to her hobby of drawing. She inspired me to develop a love of sketching.

I started shopping at arts and crafts stores and filling the pages in my sketchbook while experimenting with different mediums. To be fair, the drawings were just as good as one would expect a fourth grader’s to be but I found joy in putting the pencil to paper.

I spent most of my days sitting on the same bench and drawing different characters, people or objects. I tried out art classes and different styles like painting on canvas or wood. I dabbled in hand-thrown pottery later on.

As time went on, I started drawing less but I still gained an ability to observe. I now value the beauty in the ordinary.

My quiet and observant personality I grew would still come back to bite me later on. Middle school was arguably the most awkward phase of my life.

I was going through different phases in finding who I was and what I was interested in. I had gotten social media around this time and would scroll and look at other people’s videos, trying to see what I liked too. My quirky interests would often be perceived as “weird” or “different.”

I never sat with many people at lunch, just my two best friends. One day, one of them left to do something, and it was just my friend and I alone at a table. A few girls came up to us as a “dare” and told us that we were “so quiet” and they had “never really heard us talk.” I didn’t understand why they had came to us specifically or what we did to make us so different from them. My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I tried to laugh it off with my friends after.

In that moment, I didn’t fully realize that I was being mocked by them. I went home and thought about the interaction more and once I came to the realization, I needed to change how I presented myself.

I didn’t want to be perceived as “weird” or “quiet;” I just wanted to be perceived as normal. I started following trends I saw online and trying to conform to how society wanted me to look or act, regardless of what I wanted to be.

Entering high school changed that.

I found friends who supported me no matter what, and I started accepting my authentic self. I wanted to be who I truly was and find people who liked me for that, not change myself for what other people want me to be.

I unconsciously built who I am today through moments like these. The smells of my hometown were never just smells. They were memories, pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I was putting together.

Now, I look back at the snippets of my childhood: the resilience, finding new interests and changing who I am. I realize these seemingly insignificant moments were all leaving something behind myself, like a scent on fabric. They were traces of who I would become long before I knew who I’d be.