What's In A Name

So this story takes me back to my sophomore year of highschool. The best during those four years without question. I was making people laugh with regularity and really turning on the charm and actually making friends. My face was finally clear of all the breakouts, The teachers were actually awesome (Shoutout to Ms. Bania) and I was finally hitting my stride. This was all a complete one-eighty to what had happened only a year prior during my first year. I was called Oreo, white on the inside, corny. I was coming from a private school, and it didn’t help that at the time I was going through a huge Billy Joel/Elvis Costello phase. Button-ups, v-neck sweaters, and high-water converses when most everyone else in the class was rocking Foot Locker’s finest didn’t aid my case. Feeling ostracized was the norm for me and I couldn’t let that happen again. From the jump of sophomore year, I had somewhat improved my wardrobe(still wore those FUBU sneakers though) and my jokes and confidence were both peaking at the right time. For only the second time in my life, I felt like I had mass appeal. More than just a few people actually enjoyed being around me and enjoyed the brand of humor and oddness I brought to the table. There was already a sense of belonging and approval over those first few months of sophomore year that I had failed to gather during the entire duration of my freshman year. My inside jokes in bio honors class left not one dry eye. My stick figure drawings in English class for vocab assignments always aroused curious looks and chuckles from the back. My furious attempts at Spanish slang in Spanish 1 made me the of the group. Lunch period was great because I actually had a crew to sit with. Gym class would prove to be my magnum opus, however. Whether it was swimming during winter or flailing through tennis in the spring I was effortlessly drawing people to me which felt impossible only a year prior. During the summer coming into sophomore year, I had gone through a bit of a growth spurt and hadn’t bought new gym shorts. Being the renaissance man I am, as well as incredibly lazy, I didn’t buy new ones. I thought it insignificant but those too-short shorts I wore finally caught the attention of one of the more popular students in the class. One day he just shouts over to me “Hey why your knees always showin??” I replied with a puzzled “I don’t know”. To which he replied, “Imma call you kneecaps”. I gave him a thumbs up and nonchalantly said “that’s cool”. I paused for a second and thought to myself “yeah that fits. I like that”. This was my first time getting a cool nickname given to me so I had no idea what that would mean or the magnitude of it. Well in the following weeks, he would tell his friends about me as well as others in the class. He would frequently greet me with “yo my boy kneecaps” as well as introduce me to his friend group which entailed the obvious question: “are you kneecaps??”. For a brief period, people knew me more by my nickname than my actual name. Heck, I even changed my middle name on Facebook to “kneecaps” for good measure. If sophomore year was a key lime pie the nickname was the whipped cream. Getting that nickname cemented all the reassurance I felt during that year. But honestly, it was just important to be genuine and allow the right people to come into my sphere. Instead of worrying about how others perceived or identified me, I went into sophomore year thinking I’m gonna be unapologetically me and do it with loads of confidence and if I didn’t end up flying at least I would “fall with style” as a famous Pixar toy character once said.