Yearly Playlists and Yunasa
Every winter, my dad and I send an invitation to over 50 exclusively selected music-loving family and friends. The challenge: pick one song released from the current year for our collection: Project Mixtape. My dad and I (the DJs) create well-crafted playlists from seemingly discordant songs. There’s always a wide variety of music, but usually one song doesn’t quite seem to fit. Throughout my life, I have felt like that odd song out.
From a young age, I was isolated because of my love of learning. Every day of second grade, I walked across campus alone, arriving at my side-of-the-classroom desk to do math with the third graders. I still remember my heart pounding every time I opened the door to the third grade classroom, and everyone’s heads turning to stare—I constantly felt like I was interrupting. I was awkwardly stuck in the middle, and didn’t belong in either place—neither the second graders nor the third graders considered me “one of them.” Eventually, I felt so out of place that I wanted to skip a grade—a request nobody had made before. The administration pulled me from class on multiple days, and I sat silently in a conference room taking tests for hours, working to prove I could skip a grade. It paid off, and I was relieved—I thought this would solve everything. But then I became “the smart girl”—a label I couldn’t shake, which cemented the feeling that I must be inexorably different, and couldn’t belong.
I thought things would get better in middle school. However, there was no flexibility to advance beyond my grade level in math, and I felt like a troublemaker again when I expressed my longing for a challenge. The only offer my principal gave me was to spend the summer before seventh grade completing two years of math online so I could skip to algebra.
Seeing algebra on my schedule made me smile, but on the first day, I was jarringly out of place. It was second grade all over again. I wasn’t taken seriously because other students couldn’t see past my exterior—the tiny ten-year-old with terrible fashion sense surrounded by teenagers. I thought that I’d forever be forced to fit in—contorting myself to others’ expectations—when what I wanted was to belong; to be somewhere where I was loved without having to change. Then I went to Yunasa.
At camp, I became part of a tribe of odd songs. Yunasa is a summer camp in Michigan for gifted and talented kids, and a mix between traditional camp activities and introspective workshops. My ears perked up when people talked about lacking options for advancement, or not feeling understood by their peers. Our mutual understanding didn’t negate our diversity—we were just in sync on a level deeper than I thought possible. At Yunasa, my connections transcended age, and being young never inhibited me—I was treated as an equal for the first time. At Yunasa, I belonged.
After Yunasa, I wondered: could school be more like camp? I took it upon myself to find a school offering advanced classes without hurdles, and a community where I would belong—not have to fit in. Vistamar fit the bill. At Vistamar, I reinvented myself and worked towards becoming confident and self-assured. I spoke up in math class, and became a coveted collaborator. I was as nerdy as I wanted to be, and connected with teachers and students because of that, not in spite of it.
The part I love most about Mixtape is we never ask anyone to change their song—even if it’s the odd one out. We never say “yours doesn’t fit, so we didn’t include it.” Every song has its place because we decide each song will belong, and we work until that goal is reality. Sometimes it doesn’t make total sense at first—but the more you listen, the more it feels right.