Extended About Me (part 3 of 5)

Part 1: http://claudelaine26.blogspot.com/2016/04/extended-about-me-part-15.html 
Part 2: http://claudelaine26.blogspot.com/2016/04/extended-about-me-part-2-of-5.html

By the time I reached high school, I felt pretty at ease with myself. I had gotten into a competitive all-girls Catholic high school and knew that I was on my way to achieving all of my goals. Again, I found myself in a small, nurturing environment, and without boys (who were more an enigma than a distraction to me) I could focus on becoming my best self. Enjoying photography and scrapbooking, I joined the yearbook committee, one of only two freshman interested. The other freshman ended up becoming one of my closest friends even though we only had French class together that year. During the first semester of French I, however, our teacher got into the habit of mixing up our chosen French class names—I was “Claudine” and she was “Jeanne-Marie”. Very soon he taught us another French word, jumelle, or “twin”, and all of a sudden, not only did I have a sister, but a twin. True, we are both medium height Filipina girls with dark hair and interests in yearbook, but besides that we had very different personalities. It was also perhaps my first experience being identified as Filipina as opposed to being identified as the smart girl. More relevant at the time was the undeniable change in how I built relationships with the girls that would ultimately become and still are my best friends. Not simply did I see them as friends, but as family, my sisters. Even when graduation threatened to split us all up, something between destiny and luck split the six of us into three pairs, one pair each going to the same university.

Even though I didn’t end up getting into Yale, my college counselor was extremely supportive in my decision to pursue college outside of California, and it was through her that I researched Brown and applied there as well. When I was accepted and decided to go, I felt on top of the world—everything I had worked for was paying off, and I was going to live out my dream of studying and living away from home. Like many new college students, once I arrived I faced many unforeseen obstacles. Boys, who were easily avoidable in high school, were suddenly everywhere from my residence floor to my classes. All of my experiences with boys had been awkward and I desperately wanted to avoid the constant uncertainty of how to socialize with the opposite sex. The first week of classes, one of my residence floor mates introduced me to a fellow Filipino student in our chemistry class, but quickly left us after I mentioned that I was going to eat lunch in the dining hall near the dorm. Suddenly I was alone with a boy that I had met less than five minutes earlier, and all I knew about him was that he was Filipino and also taking chemistry. Somehow, perhaps by pretending that I was simply getting to know another girl, I made it through the lunch with relatively little awkwardness, and genuinely enjoyed the almost two-hour conversation that we had. I enjoyed it so much that I invited him upstairs to see my room, which my mom and I had taken great care to decorate and personalize. Little did I know that simply asking, “Do you want to come upstairs and see my room?” to a person of the opposite sex could be interpreted as asking something completely different. Fortunately he later became one of my closest guy friends, was able to determine from my behavior that I actually wanted to show him my room.

After John and I became co-chairs of the Filipino student association the next year, he divulged that the first time we met he actually thought I invited him to my room “to get some action.” This, coupled with other peculiar situations prompted me to take a different approach to “learning how to interact with guys.” For much of the next two years of college, boys were my source of information. Essentially I was doing unofficial research on how boys functioned and how they interacted with girls. I asked them about hair products, clothes, what girls were attractive, how did they know if they liked someone as more than a friend. As a student leader, albeit a very young inexperienced one, I had access to many boy friends and my role as a student leader almost provided a safe mask to hide my vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, working with John compelled me to play yin to his yang—where he was more commanding as a leader by holding members to their responsibilities, I was more obliging and picked up the slack left behind. My leadership responsibilities allowed me to neglect an aspect of my life that had been so important to me—my academic performance. For the first time, I wasn’t failing, but I was floundering. For once, I clearly wasn’t “the smart girl” anymore. I wasn’t enjoying chemistry or physics, and I still liked biology and neuroscience, but what I really found interesting was my Human Development classes in the Education Department. For the first time, there were answers to the question, “How did I become the way I am today?” It was clear that being successful was going to be more complicated than I envisioned.