Three by Brenda Nicole Peña

Author:Brenda Nicole Peña
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2021-07-30T08:04:34+00:00

It’s a blessing and a curse to be able to experience so many intoxicating emotions at once, especially while trying to find your way as a young adult. Looking through those journals and reliving those experiences on paper was more difficult than I thought it would be as well, but I realized how necessary it was to talk about the sexual stuff and curious mentality—as well as the power of saying no. As a teenager, all you want to feel is accepted. Even though I said no to the boy I loved and stayed true to my morals, I still ended up feeling terrible inside. The sin surrounding that feeling ate me up and made me vulnerable. I became desperate to take my actions back at that point in time.

But now that I’ve reflected on my journal entries, it was the best thing I could have done. I said no and moved forward. I said no not just to sex, but to a boy I loved—which was hard. I’m not going to lie, it was all very difficult, and before being forced to go on a church retreat by my mother, I was using every guy I met as a new excuse to get over Anthony.

Meeting Kyle was also a very valuable lesson to me in the short time that I knew him. I asked myself all the time if he was right. Was I disgusting? The answer to that is a big, fat NO. Being Mexican is not disgusting. And as far as I am concerned, embracing who you are is beautiful and important.

Kyle’s story, although sad, was a huge turning point in my life. I was exposed to discrimination in a way that I had never experienced before. Even worse, I let him have control over my mind for that moment because I believed that I wasn’t good enough to be around him or his family.

As much as I wish that no boy or girl ever had to experience prejudice and racism in their lives, I know that is simply not realistic. And for this reason, I wanted to share another valuable lesson that I always knew about but needed to practice even more.

The lesson is to be kind. Be kind to those that are different than you. Be kind to people who bring you ill will, even if you don’t want to. And more importantly, be kind to yourself. As you can probably guess by now, I didn’t let this boy and his family bring me down for too long. But imagine if I had. Imagine if I had believed that I was disgusting for even longer than that moment? Even more so, imagine if I had stereotyped every man outside of my culture and decided that they were racist just because I had a bad experience with one boy when I was seventeen. I won’t do that.

Take your lessons, learn from them, and keep growing. This story was too important to leave out, so I had to make a sidetrack.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.