I love pro-wrestling. And if you don’t know, I am talking about the fake one. Hey… Star Wars is fake to people.
So anyway, last month, I had one of the strangest encounters I have ever had with someone in my life. I was at Gamestop when I saw a child, who I assumed to be ten or eleven, wearing merch from the same wrestler I was wearing at the time. The kid approached me and complimented my shirt and I did the same to him. Then he told me that it was nice to see another wrestling fan because his friends were not that into it. I have no clue what I was thinking at the time but in my attempt to reassure him, I suggested that even though it’s not real, wrestling is still cool.
I think I broke his world.
The kid was shaken and just looked at me like, “what do you mean, it’s not real?” I felt pretty awful about myself.
So how does this have anything to do with me, who I am and what my high school experience was? Well for me, finding out the reality of wrestling was—as someone who grew up in Nepal and did not celebrate Christmas—my-Santa-Claus-is-not-real-moment. Except unlike this child, I found out in a more gradual fashion. I just got to a point at 11-years-old that I matured enough to finally begin questioning it and just look for the answer online. But when I did find the truth, it did not discourage me for long. In fact, it made me appreciate the art even more, which is what I pray happens with him too.
As a six-year-old in Nepal, I actually picked up my first bit of English by watching pro-wrestling. I have Jim Ross to thank for that. But when I moved to the States at ten years old, even though I knew the language better than most new immigrants from having learned it formally for a few years in school, I still had the feeling of being out of place socially. So I instantly used whatever American pop-culture I knew to try and make friends, one of which was using wrestling catchphrases, which I thought were just genius at the time.
If you knew me in middle school, I was certainly quite peculiar, to say the very least. I sort of adopted this alter-ego that was inspired by wrestling and had my own gimmick to go along with it. All of this probably seemed bizarre to even people who knew me and understood it somewhat, much less for anyone who took it seriously or couldn’t tell.
Regardless, it did allow me to adapt and gradually build a social group. But in the process, I began losing touch with how I had been raised for the first decade of my life. Looking back at it, it was okay that I was different at 14 than I was at ten, but it wasn’t okay that I was forgetting who I was at ten. All of the friends and relatives who had teased that I would be unrecognizable after I moved to the States were proven correct in a matter of fewer than two years.
That’s where Malden High comes in—because not only did I grow intellectually and meet some incredible human beings along the process, I also gradually reconnected with culture and tradition over the last four years and finally discovered a level of spirituality. This culminated in a day-long traditional Hindu coming-of-age ceremony that I had last April. It made me realize that while I don’t need to conform to all the wishes of my parents, I should, at the very least, make the effort to respect it.
After four years at Malden High, I don’t need a shtick anymore. These past four years have allowed me to become comfortable in my own shoes and become fully authentic. It’s like a pro-wrestler finally perfecting their character work and connecting with the audience, except I didn’t have to suplex anyone in the process.
