A lot of people probably would’ve been tipped off by the incense or the different colored walls. Maybe the djembe in the corner used sometimes as casual furniture. Maybe someone else would've been tipped off by the people who regularly came and stayed with us.

It’s not like I didn’t know something was different. While my cousins were all in CCD in the mornings, I was out on the veranda learning about Buddhism and meditating.

While everyone else was taking vacations to white sand beaches, we were driving off to Maine to camp with people who drank organic coconut milk and smelled kinda funny.

When I opened the fridge in Boston on our halfway stop I was hoping for a pitcher of lemonade. Instead, I was met with rice milk.

“Is there anything to drink?” I asked my stepmom.

“Well, they eat more organic than we do. We should probably be eating more like them. Maybe we can stop at Trader Joe’s while we’re out here,” said she. We were off the next morning after watching the sunrise over the Boston harbor.

While most girls my age were learning to braid hair, I was out in rural Maine learning to pitch a tent, dancing around a campfire and doing gymnastics around the grass — no shoes of course.

God, what could've been so different?

When I came back to school that summer wearing my hair wrap and puka shell anklet, the other girls were carrying $100 backpacks around. I was confused. It was just like yesterday that we were all running around playing tag on the playground.

Now, I was an outsider.

My tangled hair and big polo were out of place. I most likely was the only girl in the school wearing long skirts still. So, I took to reading as my sanctuary.

Instead of playing games with the other girls or talking about crushes on boys, I dove into books. But books can't replace human contact. Books don't replace having friends. This was the beginning of me wishing we were — I was… normal?

The feeling only grew. That next year my grandma took pity on me — I walked into school with a Vera Bradley backpack. I learned to curl my hair. I learned to braid and to straighten my hair. I joined cheerleading, the most normal thing I could think of.

Yet, I still stuck out somehow. I didn’t understand why the boys didn’t like me like they liked my friends as I tried to fit in. I wore all the right clothes. I just couldn’t subscribe completely to the things the other girls did.

They flirted with the boys. I didn't understand boys.

They smelled like perfume and shampoo. I smelled like Japanese soap.

They went to beaches and came back with tans. I sat under umbrellas to avoid a sunburn.

My friends enjoyed the differences I had to offer. We’d sit around, and I’d teach them about auras and meditating after cheer practice late at night. I’d offer existential pearls of wisdom while we sat out on roofs looking at the stars.

By the time I was in my freshman year, no matter how much makeup I put on, no matter how much I damaged my hair with a straightener... I was still the black sheep. I was taught girl power, and I definitely didn’t understand the disrespect that these girls sat through by these older boys.

Yet, I tried my hardest.

I made my cheer team by a mere 10 points, but my awkward body movements always kept me in the back of the squad. I stuck through football season. I sat quietly through parties and sleepovers.

It was all so different from the thrift-store, farmer’s market weekends I was used to. I watched from the sidelines anyway, still not understanding why the hell I just couldn’t fit in.

It was halfway through basketball season when I snapped. After years I was trying to fit in and years of failing, years of being the weird, quiet girl with the second-hand “cool” clothes, there was a game where most of the girls I was close with weren’t there.

I was quiet the entire bus ride. I held my tongue as they removed me from my rightful spot in my build group like I was disposable. Then —

“Um… Ca… Ca… Calista? Yeah, Calista. Move to the back corner.”

Hours of trying to fit in. Hours of traveling to games. Hours of hating myself because I wasn’t brought up the way that everyone else was.

All for what? They didn’t even remember my name after nine months. That was it.

I went home and cried to my dad.

“You’re not going back there,” he said.They had always supported everything I had wanted to do, but this was a final straw, seeing his daughter cry about how her differences made her feel bad about herself.

So for months, I sat alone in my room covered in dream catchers. I stared at myself in the mirror until I liked what I saw. Without makeup. I went to poetry readings with my stepmom and got henna drawn up my arms.

I was done trying to fit in. It was obvious I was raised to stick out. I was different, and so was my family.

It was a summer later, unshaved hair running down both my legs in homemade cut-off shorts that my stepmom and I drove out to a lake beach. We got there at sunset as everyone was leaving.

As the sun dipped below the pines, as I felt the algae squish between my toes, as I screamed gleefully with the joy of life right in front of me, I realized that those girls I so desperately tried to fit in with would have never stepped their feet into a lake.

They wouldn’t have gone two days without shaving their legs. Yet, I was happier than I ever was. All because I was true to who I was.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m still a sucker for shopping at Forever 21.