Growing up in a mostly middle class suburb of Ohio, I was exposed to a lot of bullshit expectations by society. Naturally, being a kid and thinking that everything I heard from adults, or saw in a commercial on tv was just the way things were. Movies and tv shows had an effect as well. I was never really taught by my parents or other people whom I looked up to, that almost anything can be analyzed in multiple different aspects. Most of the things I heard, I just took for granted and accepted them at face value, without questioning a thing. It took a surprisingly long time for me to realize that I was raised this way, and I had been living most of my life thinking the same way. It was not until somewhat recently that I began to question aspects of my everyday life that I had never given any thought to before.
I started playing soccer when I was 4 or something around that age. Then I noticed that my dad really liked to watch and play basketball, so I picked that up not too long after. Eventually, by the time I reached freshman year of high school, I had played soccer, basketball, baseball, football, lacrosse, and was a track runner. I assume that I traveled down this path because I saw that my dad really enjoyed sports, and it made him happy to watch me play as well. I started to do well in the sports that I really enjoyed (soccer, track) and so I kept at it. I was good at sports, and I was told most of my infant life that this is what boys do, they play sports and video games. Both of which I excelled at. I don’t blame my parents for not forcing me to push my boundaries, exit my comfort zone, and explore other areas of interest. As far as I was concerned, I was doing what I was supposed to do, and I was good at it. So I didn’t try anything different.
All of my friends were sport-y type boys, so I never really had to stray too far from the path which I was traveling on to feel like I fit in. This mainly continued throughout senior year of high school, by which time I was slowly losing interest in sports, but still competed in track, as I was good at that. But then I got to college where I wasn’t playing sports anymore, and didn’t have my standard group of friends to hang out with. Wow did I realize quickly how simple-minded I had been living my life. I didn’t read, I didn’t write, I wasn’t very creative or funny, and didn’t have a whole lot of interests except sports and video games for the most part. It’s now 4, almost 5 years later and I’m still learning new things every day that I probably could have figured out when I was too busy being a 14-year old boy who did exactly as he was told and never formed an intuitive opinion of his own. So it’s cool at the moment that I get to learn all these interesting things that I could have been doing for a while now. I’m really starting to recently develop an appreciation of art. Creative people are interesting to me, and I’m happy that I am learning to see the world from a different perspective, even if it was 5 or 10 years later than I would have liked to realize it.
- Aaron Coolman
