Unchosen One

I was unlikely. In everything I did. An awkward child, an awkward teenager struggling with loner status in a school lined with the brace-teethed children of lawyers and doctors and parents much more prestigious than my own. Unlikely to be chosen for any sports or games or even the school dance.

And so, why I was chosen for the youth exchange program was beyond me. Certainly I had applied, but I was fully ready to remain in my perpetual state of being Unchosen. It was a surprise, to say the least. I had good grades, but others had better. Others were prettier, from better families than mine; a thousand excuses flew across my brain as I immediately launched myself into a completely invisible panic attack. I had no idea what in the holy hell I had just signed up for, but now that bed was made and I was faced with a choice.

I'll remember boarding that plane for the rest of my life. Nearly 40 hours from BC to Bangkok, standing up and walking the plane every few hours so I wouldn't get blood clots, the absolute panic as the plane began the slow dive to touch down in Thailand. This was real. This was going to happen, and it was going to happen to me.

I was 16.

That year I spent in Bangkok will be forever earmarked in my brain as the catalyst of the chain reaction of events that made me the person I am today. I was a lonely teenager made the more so by being so far removed from my family that I could not just simply "go home" were something to go wrong. Crackly phone calls home were infrequent due to cost and put me in paroxysms of a guilt I could not name.

I attended a public school while I was there, where I made friends who I still hold dearer to my heart than I ever imagined. I was being introduced to the principal the first day of school, and noticed four heads peeping around the sliding glass door to his office. Those four girls became my girls, my closest true-heart friends. They linked arms with me, two on each side, and began the process of introducing me to the entire school. Several hundred of us all ate our lunch in the courtyard instead of the lunchroom, so that everyone could have a chance to sit with me and talk to me.

It was, however, impossible to forget that I did not belong. People giggled at my shaking, uncertain accent and baby words and stared in awe at my white skin, and marveled at my willingness to do everything that they did or at least fail by trying. I remember a day we had to go to the market mid-school day to get some supplies for a project, and my classmates railed against the shopkeeper for trying to charge me double for being a foreigner. "She's one of us, look at her school clothes." I can remember exactly when I noticed that people weren't staring at me in the streets as much - I was still foreign, but had ceased to be "different".

For a short time, that made me almost as uneasy as the staring had. I didn't know the feeling of belonging, certainly not to a community I wasn't even really part of. But it led to a blissful sort of apathy; I no longer cared whether people thought of me or not, and I no longer cared what they thought at all.

It was during a hot-season festival called Songkran where I learned to be self-reliant in full, because it was during that festival that some out-of-town workers attempted to abduct me. Fortunately I was rescued by friends before any harm could be done, but the event left me badly shaken and forced me to see a side of the world's ugliness that nobody should have to see. I still struggle with PTSD from the abduction attempt, but it no longer affects me the way it did. Those demons have ceased to howl and only occasionally remind me of their presence.

The day I returned home was bittersweet.

I was unlikely, and yet here I am.