If you try hard enough to be something you aren't, you become that very thing...hopefully.

So, I like to think of myself as an ambivert. Not 100% introvert, but not 100% extrovert either. More like a healthy medium...depending on the day. Sometimes I like to be by myself and other times I can be the life of the party if I want to. Most days, one greatly outweighs the other and that's usually based on my mood. If I feel like I want to be a loner and do my own thing, with me, myself and I, and just don't want to socialize with other people at all (that was definitely a run-on), the intro to extro scale is a good 75/25. There aren't really days where I just want to completely be social and extremely extroverted, but I can get the scale to a good 50/50 sometimes.

Anyway, I said all of that to say that I am an observer. I observe things. It's what I do. I hate to be in the spotlight, I'd much rather be in the background if I can and avoid being the center of attention as much as possible. I pride myself on my keen observational skills. Especially when I'm in a place where I don't feel like I belong, or maybe even in a place I do belong, but I don't know anyone in the room. I am most comfortable standing in the corner of a room and people-watching. I watch their posture, their gestures, what phrases they use the most, how they talk to people, how they respond, who speaks when, and I try to figure out the hierarchy in the room.

 I understand that this blog is supposed to describe a specific anecdote of a time where I had to mushfake and it turned into the real deal, but for me, I kinda feel like "fake it 'til you make it" has become my life's motto. Like for everyday things. When I was a child, and growing up, I was I guess what you could call shy. Okay, not shy, but quiet. Quiet is what I was. 'Til this day I get told that I'm "too quiet." Anyway, I never liked to talk in groups, I hated being called out (still do), and I hated having to socialize with people that I wasn't friends with. I wasn't quiet because I was necessarily scared to speak (although stage fright was a huge deal back then), but it was more so of the fact that I didn't have anything to say. At least nothing of substance, I really don't like small talk.

I realized though, when I was in high school that I was going to have to step out of my shell a bit when I got to college if I ever wanted to meet people, and make friends. That revelation is what sparked my mushfaking years. I've always been described as outgoing by others (I wasn't an outcast, guys, I had friends and stuff, I promise), but I had never really been able to see it in myself. I just always felt like an introvert. Like a complete introvert. When I got to college though, I told myself, "Maiya, you are going to put on a smile, and say hello to people in the hallways, in the elevators, make small talk, and be social, suck it up." That probably wasn't verbatim but you get the point. It wasn't that far off I can tell you that. But, that's what I did, and what I still do. I suck it up, I calm my nerves, give myself some words of encouragement, and I raise my hand in class. I walk confidently down the street with my shoulders back and my head held high, I take note of my posture and try to correct it, if I notice my feet dragging while I walk, I pick them up, I say hello to people in the grocery store and make small talk (which I still despise), I ask the cashiers how their days have been, I give out compliments (like if someone's nail polish is cute or shoes or hair dye or something). Basically, I do everything that I wouldn't have normally done 3 years ago. I try my hardest to exude the confidence that I know I possess so that others can see it too.

My heart definitely still pounds so hard sometimes, depending on the situation-- to the point that I think if I can hear it then everyone else can too-- but I still push the old me out of the box I used to be in...everyday. I do this everyday. I am well on my way to becoming a pro at mushfaking. Because face it, if I didn't explain this just now, most of you would never have known. And over the years, most of this has just become a part of my personality, honestly.

I loved Amy Cuddy's TED talk and I realized that some of the things she was saying about how "our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves," and how "our behavior changes our minds/outcomes," is so true. Those reasons are exactly why I do what I do. Before watching the TED talk, I thought that I just wanted to mushfake, fake it 'til I made it, but now, I want to "fake it 'til I become it."

Blog #5

When I think about my life and my transition from home to college, it's crazy how much I can relate to Vicki Madden's Why Poor Students Struggle. I grew up in a single parent household from the age of 6 until I left home and although we weren't poor poor, we weren't the richest either. I had a roof over my head and food to eat, provided by my mother's 2 jobs, but we were nowhere near the middle class. And like many other families from low socioeconomic backgrounds, we made it work.

I come from a predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood and that is exactly what my entire k-12 life was...Black people and Hispanic/Latino people. The culture that I was immersed in growing up was vast however. I didn't just stay in my neighborhood year round ☺. I’ve been to the 90210, Orange County, China town, out of state, and many other places where I experienced different cultures. But it’s one thing to visit and another entirely to live there. Which is what I found out when I came to college, LOL. Talk about culture shock! Madden says that “the more elite the school, the wider the gap,” (Madden 3) and although SDSU is no Ivy League school, when I came here, it might as well have been.

Entering into the discourse community that is college, I had to learn what the expectations of language, popular slang, academic knowledge, college jargon, and all the other fun stuff that come with being thrown into the deep end entailed. There’s an “unspoken transaction: trading your old world for a new world, one that doesn’t seem to value where you came from” (Madden 4) and that is definitely true especially coming to a school where your race is like 4%. Discourse communities want you to assimilate to whatever culture that community has already set in place. So there was definitely that tug of war on my psyche of what am I doing here? Do I even need college? Of course you need college, Maiya, no one’s gonna take you seriously without a degree! But it’s so expensive! I don’t fit in here at all, like 75% of the school are blonde, white girls. I’m gonna be like the only Black girl in all my classes! What if Financial Aid doesn’t cover everything, I don’t have the money to stay here! If that conversation that I had (entirely in my head btw and went on for much longer) seems very real, it’s because it is. Like Madden said, “If you don’t have $700, it might as well be a million.”

Despite the many struggles I encountered during my transition, one of the most common was changing the language from what I was used to using at home to what was more acceptable for university life, much like, but in many different ways different from what Amy Tan talks about in Mother Tongue. I’m a black girl so I grew up in an English speaking household, but much like Tan explains, I had to decide which of my Englishes were suited for which situations. Mostly socially, rather than academically, I mean I went to high school and wrote academic papers before, so that wasn’t really the issue, but I had different slang that was used in my household that I kind of just assumed everyone else would know. For example, my apartment manager put a note on the door explaining that the water was going to be turned off for a certain time because they were going to be working on the pipes. I was the first to see the note so I told my housemates (who are not Black), “don’t cut the water on, they’re gonna work on the pipes.” Naturally, one would assume that through context clues, the message that I was trying to convey was clear…don’t turn the water on. BUT, apparently using the word ‘cut’ in place of ‘turn’ is not normal. They all stood there and were like “What does that mean, “don’t cut it on?” and “why’d you say “cut?”” I’ve been in college for 3 years and still haven’t figured everything out apparently *Kanye Shrug*. When I go home however, I don’t worry about how I speak or how what I say will be translated in the minds of my family because they speak the same English that I do.

So there are many reasons that poor students struggle, aside from the obvious financial issue and that’s what I love about Vicki Madden’s explanation because “it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are that cause the most trouble” (3). Language especially, because people view language as a signifier of how intelligent a person may be, like Amy Tan explains numerous times regarding her mother. But, you know what they say…fake it ‘til you make it.