Publisher's Synopsis
Top New York Times Best-Selling Books of 2018, Lead by Michelle Obama's Becoming. Becoming - Magnolia Table - Girl, Wash Your Face - Diary of a Wimpy Kid #13: Meltdown - Where the Crawdads Sing - Educated - Where The Rawdads Sing.WHERE THE RAWDADS SINGOne of the worst things that a person can let into their life is a negative person. Life is already hard enough, then we allow others to bring us down. This has been a problem for me all my life. I have tried to impress or be accepted by others since I was a young child. The harder I tried, the more I became a different person. I would do and say things that I thought made me look cool. The problem with doing that is that it so hard to continue to be someone you really aren't. After a while, I came to realize that some people are going to down you anyway. No matter what I did or who I was, people were going to talk about me both positively and negatively. Trying to not listen to the negative things that people say is not easy at all, especially for me. I have been talked about my whole life. I have heard so many negative things that you would think that I would be used to it by now, but that is the farthest thing from the truth. Because I am a really sensitive person, my feelings have been hurt constantly. Sometimes my feelings were hurt so bad that I would shed a few tears. One of the things that hurt me the most was when people talked about my teeth. I have heard people say some very creative things about my buck teeth and have been called all kinds of names such as "Bucky", "walrus", "beaver", and many more. My peers gave me the nickname "Buck". After hearing people call me so many degrading names I ended up accepting Buck because it didn't sound as bad to me. As you can probably guess, I have very low self-esteem and always get shy around other people. I feel that, by being myself, I could never please others and whatever perception they had of me, I accepted as the truth. I could be feeling like I was handsome man and a really attractive person; then, out of nowhere, someone would call me ugly and instantly that's exactly how I felt multiplied by ten. I wouldn't just feel unattractive, but like I was the ugliest creature God ever created. I would ask God why I was not handsome or fine to the ladies like other guys I saw. All of my life I have hated cameras or having pictures taken of me. I never liked any picture that was taken of me. I have always been a person who dreams and set goals at a very high level. I grew up thinking that I could have and accomplish whatever I wanted as long as I put my mind to it. That is why I have always been fairly successful in the things that I set my mind to do. When I would share my plans and goals with others who I thought were mu friends, they would say something negative or downing. Once, I met a really gorgeous lady and wanted to show her that I would make a good companion. I started out just being me. I bought her flowers, wrote poems for her, listened to her every word, and was an all-around gentleman toward her. Then I let a couple of guys who I thought knew more about women than me give me some bad advice. They told me that women hated a guy that was too nice and didn't want a man to give them too much attention. Because they had a lot of women, I listened to them and changed how I treated and stopped being me. Before long, she was tired of the new me. She told me that she was looking for something different n a man, and she thought she had found that in me. She said she was glad that I had shown my true colors before she fell in love with me. She was open to remaining friends, but she would not date me anymore. After that conversation I felt like a fool. When I was being myself, she was really thinking about letting me be her man. Because I listened to other peoples' lies and opinions, I had just messed up the opportunity to be with a really gorgeous woman, And, Boy, was she FINE!
