Describe a challenge you encountered in the past year.
It is said that no good deed goes unpunished, unbeknownst to me I would get an idea of what this quote would mean. That was my biggest challenge I encountered in this past year. It all started when a young lady in my honors class approached me, she expressed that our teacher had been picking on her. To make her feel more comfortable in our class I suggested hanging around myself and few other peers, as a form of solidarity. This young lady hung out with my peer and I in the school library, I asked her questions about what she like to do, if she worked and things like that, general questions, she even helped us register for our classes for the spring. Passed this day, I never hung out with this young lady again.
Weeks later my coach called me and asked if I had time for meeting, when I say weeks, I mean at least 3 or 4 weeks later. When he called, I heard in his voice something was off so asked if “everything was, ok?”, he replied, “everything was good”. I come in and get called into an office, with 3 gentlemen including my coach questioning my relationship with this young lady, I replied, “That I spoke to her on a few occasions and explained what I mentioned in the above paragraph. The third gentleman, whom I was not familiar with expressed that this young lady said that I made her feel uncomfortable. I guess in my general questioning made her feel uneasy. I immediately felt flush, I didn’t feel flush or nervous because I did anything wrong, but because I was trying to help a fellow student who expressed to me, she was uncomfortable with our teacher. After explaining myself to the tribunal, the consensus was to cease all contact with the young lady which was easy because my interactions with her were minimal to begin with.
The true challenge was trying to reconcile how being nice and landed me in the hot seat. I wasn’t done, I still needed to meet with the Dean of students to formally finish the process. The Dean of students expressed to me that this complaint would not be recorded on my transcript and even recognized my personality. She told me to keep my personality as it is, I replied, “It’s going to be difficult dean, because trying to be nice is what got me in this situation in the first place”. With a beautiful smile, she replied, “don’t change who you are!” I just finished book by Malcolm Gladwell, titled Talking to Strangers. He offered great advice on how to talk to strangers, this advice just helped me finally resolve this conundrum that still troubled me until finishing the book today. The lessons were, one approach strangers with caution and humility, and to tread carefully. So that I can further prevent any more social catastrophes.
Yours truly the realest Author you will ever know!
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