Jan 10, 2013- The loss of my innocence

     Growing up in a town where every sports game ends in a tie, and every child believes in santa until they are 12, is the parents of my towns way of trying to keep their children as sheltered as possible for as long as possible.  Each and everyone of us are taught from the beginning never to look at anyone differently, and never ever point out anyone else's differences.  Now all this is nice, but the down side to growing up in such a sheltered town is you don't realize that not everyone is this open and excepting.  You start to think that things like racism don't really exist.  Until Alex, I never thought twice about the fact that I wasn't white, because no one had ever treated me any different because I wasn't and no one had every really pointed it out to me, so it wasn't a big issue.  After meeting my boyfriend's father, and realizing he didn't like me, I couldn't believe that someone could have anything against me, especially my boyfriends father, whom I had tried so hard to make like me.  A few weeks into our relationship, after hearing his father talking, I realized he didn't like me because I wasn't white, and that apparently made me socially lower class then his family according to him (which is funny because at the time his father was renting a one bedroom apartment and my family owns a 2 story house).  Regardless the more I was around his dad, the more I tried to change his opinion.  It wasn't until today when the dad and his girlfriend, both told Alex that I was never welcome in their home, ever that I realized that I would never be able to change their opinions about me.  They are both racist and I will never be good enough for them, and no matter what I do that will always be the case.  Today I finally understood that racism is very real, and for the first time I couldn't just turn on my charm and make them like me, and I had to deal with the fact that there were people in this world that would judge me without ever giving me a fair chance, and even those I didn't chose that, it was something I was going to have to face in life.  This conclusion was very hard to come to, because I wanted to think that everyone in the world was good and excepting, I wanted to be oblivious to the truth again because it was a huge blow to my self esteem.  Refusing to see what was really out there was the last piece of my innocence that I was holding onto, but now I have officially lost all my innocence...