When I was about 10 years old

Amjed: 0:01

I never did understand why, as a child, I was so obsessed with the book Lord of the Flies and I don't know. Somehow, after recording today's episode, I had this thought like you know, kids are kind of mean, and I don't know if it's because it's that in between phase where they were really we're really nice when we're young, like really small, and then when we get older we sort of learn to balance that. But there's this period in the middle, that where kids are just really tough. And so in today's episode I share a little bit about some of my formative years and my experiences there. Hi, this is Amjad, a simple, beautifully broken man living in a complex world. Join me as I navigate the dark and bright spots of life, sharing vulnerability and reflecting deeply along the way. May you find some benefit here that is through me, not from me. I must warn you to enter at your own risk, for in this room my humanity is showing. Welcome, my fellow humans, to episode 48 of my humanity is showing.

Amjed: 1:13

And before I get started, I just realized that there was something I forgot to share last week, and that is I posted my very first episode of this podcast on October 29th of last year, and now that we're in November, we have officially crossed the one year mark of this podcast, and when I started, that was my initial goal was to at least make it a year. And so here we are. In the middle, I missed a few episodes and so therefore we're on episode 48 instead of 53, which is our 54 even maybe. So we're a few episodes behind, and when we get to that point we'll talk about 52 weeks or 52 episodes. But we did, calendar wise, cross the one year mark, and that I don't know. I'm just going to soak that in for a moment and be grateful that I've kept going, despite all the fear and shame and the fact that I have not been actively sharing this episode I mean this podcast and been hoping that it will spread on its own, which, you know, like we say at work, hope is not a plan. But, you know, gotten to on average, about 10 to 15 listens, downloads a week, as opposed to, you know, just getting high enough to be able to feel like this is. You know, I've got a little bit of an audience that I'm sharing with and I'll get out there, and maybe even I mean this is something when I listen to other podcasts that are doing really well or YouTube channels, and I'm like, oh, you're just making money off of us, like you don't really care.

Amjed: 3:06

This is just a money making project for you, and I mean part of it is I've thought that if I could make some extra money here, maybe it would free me up to get some help, like so, for example, with the AI functionality that's now in the bus sprout site, I'm able to get a transcript and it automatically creates chapters and you know that's helpful because I've been wanting to do a transcript. However, I've noticed a couple of times as I've glanced back and I'm sure this is true every single time that the transcripts are not entirely accurate. I mean it's if you're trying to read the transcript, it can be a little hard to follow along because it's not 100% accurate, and I mean they even use the more common spelling of my name with two as instead of an AMJED. But I'm just grateful that it's there, because I didn't have anything before and now I've got a little something that I can go back and glance at or search and say did I talk about that already? And at least check that way. But in any case, you know I could. Maybe I could get some help to help spread the word or to help edit and, you know, keep, keep the transcripts and things like that clean.

Amjed: 4:28

And if it, you know, it gets to a point where I'm able to maybe do this more full time and and really focus on my journey to become a counselor, that would be something I did spend some time this weekend just searching and researching, like if I wanted to take some classes as a prerequisite, maybe I could start doing that and still looking into that, hoping that maybe in the spring maybe I can take a class and see what. You know, I haven't had a mentor recently share with me that. You know, why don't you sign up for a class and just see if that's something that you have the desire and capacity to do? Because, yeah, I mean, the idea of going back to school sounds great, but at your point in your career and your age and everything that's going on, you may find that it's just really not feasible and it's not something you're even interested in once you get into it. So why don't you sign up for a class and just take one class and see what happens? And so I have thought about that and been started down that journey.

Amjed: 5:36

But part of the thought was that if I do get to a point where there is some revenue coming in through some of these efforts, maybe I could use that toward going back to school and getting a degree so that I could do this full time, because I do really enjoy. I get a lot of benefit out of sharing my story but, more importantly, I believe I have a moral obligation to pay it forward. The fact that I have been given so much and maybe even a God given talent for that or an inclination toward that maybe that's the better word and if I don't use it, I feel like maybe I'm headed down the wrong road or I don't. I wouldn't say that I love my career now and which is one of the reasons why I haven't actively done anything, because I'm just enjoying what I'm doing so much. But there is a thought that maybe one day this is my retirement plan is to do this more full time. So anyway, here we are one year podcast in and checkin' along, and if there's even one person out there and I've gotten a couple of messages from people that I know if there's even one person that says you know, I listened to your podcast and I found great benefit in it and it really impacted me personally in a positive way, then it will have been worth it Every second of it will have been worth it, and whether I ever get to a point where I can, you know, actually turn this into a career or not. So I'll stop talking about the podcast there and switch over in the time that we have remaining.

Amjed: 7:18

I wanted to talk a little bit about my childhood, and you know, I know that this may be either interesting or boring. I don't know what. I have no idea. I've had this on the list for a while to share and I thought, man, I don't know people people might listen to this and go gosh, that's boring, and I don't know that there's really a lesson in it. It's just my journey and a little bit about me and some of the experiences I had that have shaped and molded me and impacted me. So I wanted to talk more specifically.

Amjed: 7:57

I mean there's a lot to talk about in my childhood. There's lots of interesting things that happened to me, lots of interesting stories, like the very first time I got stitches, or you know, I mean I could do a whole series on my biography and kind of take you through some interesting journeys Like so, for example, my two closest friends from middle school who are both now living in the DC area. We had a chance to have dinner together last week and I got to meet their spouses and their children and you know, my family wasn't with me but I was traveling for work and I was just awesome. I mean, it's awesome to have kept in touch after all those years. And you know, here we are adults and grown men and one of my friends has restarted school as well and you know we're just yeah, and it's like every time we sit down together it says, if we really haven't been apart too long, we just pick up right where we left off. It feels like even though there was a big gap in the middle where we didn't communicate as much or connect as much. That's just an example. I mean there's a lot I can share about that time in my life when these guys were in it and how they helped support me and shape me to who I am today.

Amjed: 9:15

But I wanted to talk about, as I mentioned, fourth grade, which you know I've been very transparent about my age, so I was trying to do the math and I believe it would have been around 1982-ish, maybe 1983, 1982, and 1983 might have been my fourth grade year, if I'm doing the math right. So if you wanna get a reference to that or at least have some context of what was going on in the world or even in the US, if you just search up like 1982, life in 1982 or something, you might get an idea of what life was like back then and what you know. I grew up in a relatively small town of Odessa, texas, but by fourth grade we had moved to Houston and then it was sixth grade that we had moved back. So between second, third, fourth and fifth grade I was in Houston and then sixth grade I moved back. So this fourth grade that I'm talking about was actually Houston and I personally enjoyed the smaller town a little bit more than I did the big town. It just felt like. I'll give you an example when we moved back, so sixth grade, seventh, eight, nine and 10, I was in Odessa. Then we moved back to Houston for 11th and 12th grade for me and that first year that we moved back I noticed this cultural phenomenon that was happening at the time.

Amjed: 10:52

This was like the late eight and 1980s and at least in Houston, it was very common that people would sit around and have cut down wars. So, in case you have no idea what that is and I can't remember if there's like another term for it, but that's what I remembered as. And the context was that, you know, a bunch of friends would be together and then they would just start insulting each other and they would try to see who could get the biggest, like most intense insult in on the other one. And it was like this war of like going back and forth and back and forth, and back and forth, and you know this, where you're just insulting or cutting down the other person and it's like well, your mom had this and that, and it was just kind of went on and on. And this was a very weird thing for me, Because when I was in Odessa, in the small town setting, we might do that, but we would never do it internally in our friend group.

Amjed: 11:49

We would do it externally, like we might kind of go after another person outside of our close friend group, or. But even that wasn't that common, you know. We might say like, oh my gosh, like look at so-and-so, what are they doing? And have some of that judgment, maybe not necessarily to their face, but we definitely didn't do that internally, like within our close friend group, like your best friends, when you were together you didn't insult each other, rather you encouraged each other and we encouraged each other and promoted each other, and that's what I was used to. And so all of a sudden I get into this environment in the big city where now suddenly people are like close friends, are sitting together and just insulting each other for the fun of it, and that was a very awkward, weird experience for me. So that might flavor a little bit of my experiences or my memory around the Houston experience when I was in fourth grade.

Amjed: 12:52

So fourth grade was a particularly difficult year for me. I was about 10 years old, like I said, if I'm doing the math right, that's, you know, just turned 10 at the beginning of the year. And so I was 10 years old and we started the school year in another school where, while our school was being constructed, so we had, you know, the school that we were going to go to and I can't remember if it was third grade was the year that we would take a bus and go pretty far away. I want to say it was like 20 minutes, 30 minutes farther, actually past the location of the school that we eventually ended up in. I can't remember if that was third grade and then bleeding into fourth grade or if it was part of fourth grade year, and then we started finally going to the school that finished construction, which was much closer to where I lived, and yeah, I can't remember for sure, but I remember in the school.

Amjed: 14:07

You know, a few things I remember is it's actually kind of weird I remember a lot of fourth grade. I mean, there's maybe several other years of my childhood that I don't remember that much, but fourth grade stands out as like a particularly challenging year and I think it's because somehow it was the year that, of all the years in my youth, I felt the least that I fit in, and if you think about a 10 year old trying to find their place in life, that was a really difficult time. So some things about me at that time. One that was before I had braces, and I don't think I got braces till a couple years later and until I was 12, maybe 13. And so, yeah, I think it was like somewhere around there 13, maybe 12, 13. And so at the age of 10, I had not had braces and I had particularly large buck teeth.

Amjed: 15:06

Like my teeth came out quite a bit and the kids would tease me about it a lot. You know they'd call me Bugs Bunny and they'd make fun of my teeth and I would try to cover them up. But I mean they're just really jut it out quite a bit. I mean they were. I still have a mold somewhere in the house of my teeth at that time and they, they jut it out. And then, to make matters worse, when I was in second grade, one of the kids stepped on my head because I was going down a slide. A bunch of kids were running up the slide and you know I tried to turn and head back up the slide and I couldn't. I couldn't get away fast enough and one of the kids stepped on my head and I hit my front, two teeth on the slide and it broke the front of the teeth like the tip of the teeth, and my mom had to come to school and pick me up this was second grade and rushed me to a dentist to then put this like kind of plaster on the tip of my teeth. And I still have that to this day. It's a little bit less visible now than it was at that time.

Amjed: 16:17

So I had, you know, my teeth were kind of two toned at that time and every once in a while the little thing would come off, the piece would come off and I'd have to go and get a replay. So you know that was a factor. And then you know, I've got these large teeth that everyone make fun of. They'd call me Bugs Bunny, it's like you know what's up, doc. So that was, that was one thing, just physical appearance wise.

Amjed: 16:40

And of course you know I'm a minority, I look different, I dressed a little different because we were not that well off. I mean, we're okay. But you know I got a lot of my clothing on sale or Kmart and got all my shoes at Kmart, which I wonder if that's the reason why I have so much foot pain now. But you know I remember going back and forth, you know, like just I remember you know there were some other kids that dressed really nicely and I couldn't, you know, afford, we couldn't afford those kinds of clothes for me. So I dressed a little awkward, weird.

Amjed: 17:26

My hair was like particularly wiry and tough and I never could get a proper haircut and now, of course, my hair is mostly gone, but at that time it was, you know, just this. I looked like I was wearing a helmet most of the time, like I had that kind of the bangs cut down on the front and then my hair would grow out and it was just big, like I remember we did I think it was around that same time in the third or fourth grade that we did a shadow drawing where you sat in a chair, they shone a light on you and then the teacher like traced you and then you kind of filled it all in and made a. You know would look like your silhouette, like a shadow silhouette of you, and I just remember looking at that and thinking about how huge my head looked because of my hair, because I had such big hair at that time. So that was another thing and I just felt like I didn't fit in. And there were all these like good looking kids with, you know, proper clothes and here I was and I couldn't seem to really make any close friends around that timeframe and that was the year that I probably had the most nicknames in my time growing up. So one of them was people used to call me, I'm Jed Clampett, which Jed Clampett was from a show called the Beverly Hillsbillies, if you ever wanna look it up.

Amjed: 19:02

And then you know it started at the beginning it was like there was a man, his name was Jed, and then something, something, something and he struck black gold, texas tea, and it's basically about this really poor family that hit gold and suddenly became rich and it's like you know, the story of the show is about kind of the humor around them trying to navigate all this wealth that they just suddenly got. But you know, kids would sing that song to me all the time and kind of make fun of me. Then, somewhere in there, when I was nine so I could say I was in third grade I actually went home, I went to India for the summer and during that trip to India there was this ritual that we typically do in our culture for children when they're newborns we shaved their head and I never had that done, supposedly. So, since it was my first time coming back at the age of nine, my family, my uncles, everybody decided, and aunts decided that my grandparents that needed to be done for me. So they shaved my head right before I came back to school. So I came back bald and the kids would make fun of me and say do you need a lollipop, kojak? And in case you don't know, kojak is kojak was a show. The actor's name was Teli Savalas and kojak was a detective and he was bald and he was trying to quit smoking. So he would like have a lollipop in his mouth all the time and he'd say who loves you, baby? And it was between the show I checked and the show was ran between 1973 and 1978, but it was still in everyone's mind. There was this in 81, 82, everyone still remembered kojak, so the kids would call me kojak until my hair finally grew back out, so that was another one. And then I remember that I haven't gotten told the nicknames yet, but I remember we did this cultural thing where the teacher asked us to prepare a food and bring it in and tell the class about it.

Amjed: 21:19

Well, I'm relatively proud of my culture and the food in particular. So I asked my mom. I said what can I make? Cause I had to actually make it Like I had to get a parent to show me how to do it and then make most of it myself, with a little bit of help from my parents. It's not like I could get my mom to cook something and I'd take it in. You were supposed to make it yourself and explain how you made it.

Amjed: 21:40

So there are these things called cheplika baps, which are? They basically look like little hamburger patties, but it's finely ground meat, almost like you get it down to a paste and then you put spices in it, you make it into like a patty and then you fry it on the stove and it goes with other food. It's kind of a side thing and we used to eat those quite a bit, and so my mom showed me how to make it and at the time when we were making it we would put like a lot of cilantro and jalapeno stuff in it. So it had like an inside. On the outside it would cook and it was brown, like a dark brown, like a hamburger, look like a hamburger patty, but, like I said it just a much more pasty texture, because the meat was like finely blended ground, not like you would think of a hamburger with a ground beef in it. This is not ground beef patty, this is like a finely food processed patty and on the inside it had a green color to it because it was very, you know, had a green texture and it was, you know, soft and very tasty.

Amjed: 22:51

So I made a bunch of these and took them to school and when I pulled them out, the kids went nuts. And one of the kids said, oh my God, you brought cow dung to school. And the teacher was like trying to calm the kids down and one kid took one of the patties, put it underneath the leg of his chair and squished it and it like spread out and it was green inside and when I thought about it it literally did look like a cow dung. I mean, you could like think, look at it and think that that's what it was. And I was mortified. Mortified Cause I felt like you know, I was mad at my mom, like why didn't she think of that? I was mad at myself for not having thought of that. And I was mad at all the kids and I was trying to explain to them like no, this is actually kind of a. It's a really nice dish. If you just try it, you'll find that, you know it's got a good taste to it. And the kids were just.

Amjed: 23:56

And I want to say at one point, I don't know if this actually happened, I don't know if I imagined this or actually did this, but I felt myself like climbing under a table and just sitting there Cause I was just so incredibly embarrassed, so incredibly embarrassed. So that was. You know, that was a pretty traumatic event for a nine, 10 year old. And again, I don't remember if it was third or fourth grade, I don't, but I think it was fourth grade, though I can remember exactly. If I go to that school, I can take you to the exact spot the tables where those tables were. I think that's cool. I've driven by it a couple of times in Houston.

Amjed: 24:36

Okay, so, final thing I'll say about this is I just want to talk about the, the names. So it started on the. How is it? Like the first day of school and one of the teachers, our PE teacher, physical education. In case you don't, I don't even have to have PE anymore, but anyway I'll touch you how out of touch I am. My kids are adults and you know I haven't really paid attention, but anyway. So in PE class, the teacher had like a Spanish speaking origin and so when she was reading the names for roll call, I was like the second person on the list and she yeah, she started. She got to my name and she said she's pronounced it like you would read a Spanish word, because my name has a J in it which in Spanish is pronounced like an H. So she got to that and she said I'm head, I'm head like I'm head. And the kids in my class who knew me because they knew me from the previous year, like they literally died. I mean, they laughed so hard. People were rolling around. This is like the first day of class. That's how the year started.

Amjed: 26:04

I should have started with that story, right, but I wanted to kind of pack all the names in together, so that was that stuck for a while and I had kind of a weird personality trait that, if you, I love nicknames to this day, like I love nicknames. Have you know, my family members have multiple nicknames. My pet hadn't you know, and I had a cat had multiple nicknames. People at work, I give them nicknames and I just love. Anytime somebody comes back with a really good nickname for me, I just love it. You know, it's like I don't know why. I just think they're so cool to have these, like it's almost especially if it's a unique name that only one person calls me, it just to me, it's like special, it's like okay, you picked a name that's kind of unique between us, and so I've always been open to nicknames.

Amjed: 26:56

But of course, you know, the kids meant it hurtfully. But what I would do to counter that is I would just adopt that name and I would just start introducing myself with that name and I would kind of tout it with pride, which of course made the kids frustrated because they were trying to get under my skin and it was getting under my skin. But I just didn't want them to see that and so I, you know, like, just played it off like that. I'd like the name and even though I do like nicknames, but I prefer if it's like in a nickname is chosen out of care and, like, you know, because someone feels that I'm special or something, rather than to make fun of me. But anyway, so the you know, hence the nickname, and you know that. So they would start, you know, so they started to look for different nicknames and there was a kid in my class who was Indian and he said oh, by the way, the word Aam in Hindi or Urdu, I think he spoke Hindi. He was like in Hindi means or in India, you might've said, india means mango. So then for a while my name was mango head, and then this one kid, this one girl, just took it a step further and started calling me mango freak. So those are like three of the names that I remember.

Amjed: 28:23

I'm trying to remember a couple of the other ones, but by the end of the year, on field day. So field day was it like toward the like the last couple of weeks of school, there was this day where you, you know, you would dress a certain way and you'd come to school and it was like basically P all day and we do all these different activities and potato sack race and all this different I mean you do all these different races and activities and it was just a really, really fun day. And people on field day at that time in our school everyone came wearing a white T shirt and throughout the day you would go around like with a marker and people would sign your shirt. So by the time the day was over, you'd have all these your friend's signatures, like all over the shirt, and the teacher signatures, and then you would have this shirt that was like kind of autographed by all the people that you went to school with. I came to school with 20 names on my shirt. I basically put every single nickname that they had come up with over the year all over this little white T shirt.

Amjed: 29:31

And I remember some of the kids getting really frustrated because I would go up and I was like, hey, you want to sign my shirt? And they're like no, you've already signed it yourself. You know, it's like I mean, they were just. They were so upset that I had embraced all these names and I think I was doing it to get them back. You know, there was a part of me that was just like I'm going to get you guys back. You've attacked me all year and this is my chance to get you back, and so I do feel like, in a way, that was there. I don't know that I had that awareness at the time, but I just remember that event very distinctly and I remember, yeah, so, like I said, very formative years and so a couple of things.

Amjed: 30:15

That and I'll wrap it up with this because I'm getting a little long that I think about today is, you know how much, how hard I try now to really fit in with people, and it's only in this last year that I have started to teach people the proper pronunciation of my name and or at least something closer to the proper pronunciation. And I have a few people at work that call me um-jed instead of om-jed and so that you know. But I've never introduced myself that way. I've never. Because I gave up as a child. I was like people don't care what my name is, let me just introduce it in a way that people can easily pronounce it and not worry about it.

Amjed: 31:02

And, like I said, I've gone a little bit further out of my way to teach people the proper pronunciation and I found that the people that really care about me appreciate that. And I haven't gone back to some of the other people that I know because I have this fear that they'll feel bad that they haven't been pronouncing it that way for all these years, or they'll have difficulty switching because they've known me for so many years with the other pronunciation, or they'll be upset with me for not having told them earlier. And you know I definitely don't want anyone to feel bad because I'm the one who's introduced myself that way for years and I've never corrected anyone until. Like I said, until recently I've never tried to teach anyone the proper pronunciation and you know I went on and I think I shared a little bit about this last time, I can't remember but you know I went on a religious trip and I came back with my head shaved and people have been really gracious, I mean everyone. I don't know if they're lying to me or if it's true, but a lot of people have said, like, actually, that kind of suits you, that doesn't look too bad. And I've had people that have not reacted at all, as if they didn't even notice that I've seen no facial expression, no, nothing. I mean it was just like hey, how are you doing? Just immediately they recognized me no comment, no question, no, nothing.

Amjed: 32:24

And I'm the one who's mentioning it like oh, by the way, in case you're wondering about my hair, because I went on this trip and I came back and I shaved my hair and I'm wondering, as I'm, you know, was thinking about today's episode I was reflecting and I was wondering, like I wonder if part of me is afraid someone's gonna say hey, kojak, you need a lollipop. The teeth thing you know, I lost my retainer years ago I think I've shared about this in a previous episode and my teeth have started coming back out a little bit and they're starting to feel a little bucked. And you know, I have this fear around that as well and this discomfort around that, and yeah, and then last thing I'll say around this topic is like today, you know, I think about food and when I take someone to an Indian restaurant who's never been, I start to have anxiety because I'm like they're like what should I order? And I'd never made that connection before. But I think part of it is that whole experience I had with those kebabs that you know, people, all the kids like this is cow dung, because that was kind of a rough experience for me and so I have a really hard time ordering food for people. I will say that, like if my wife says go ahead and order and I'll be there in a minute or whatever, I can't, I can't. Or if some friends say, you know, why don't you pick a place to eat, or why don't you order for all of us? I have so much anxiety around that, so much anxiety around ordering food for people, and I'm wondering if it's connected to the kebob thing, because I don't think I've ever made that connection before.

Amjed: 34:19

Well, we, oh boy, I went kind of long. Let's do a quick random message of the day. So I'll reach in here and see what I've pulled out of my little bucket. I'll do it quicker since I went long today. I think it was that long introduction where I was talking about the one year anniversary of the podcast. Okay, so the random message of the day I pulled out from the fortune cookie is nothing in the world is difficult if one sets his mind to it. That's an interesting quote.

Amjed: 34:53

I don't know if I believe that. I have to be honest, cause I think there are some things that are very difficult in this world that even if someone sets their mind to it, even if I set my mind to it and I'm like I'm gonna do this, I may have to push through a lot of difficulty to get to the other end of it. So I don't know. That just sounds like a way over simplification and it implies that there's no such thing as just luck or fate or whatever you want to call it. That also impacts so like, for example, this podcast.

Amjed: 35:30

I mean I've set my mind on doing this podcast and it has been difficult. I mean there's been times where it's been extremely difficult to either record or, even more so, difficult to post once I've recorded Cause I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't want to put that out into the world, I don't want people listening to that, oh man. And I've had to push through that and say, no, you made a promise to yourself that you would do this. Put it out there and just don't think about it and let the chips fall where they may. And so, yeah, I'm not sure that I agree with this one. I mean, it sounds cool, but I don't know how realistic it is. All right, I'm going to stop there. This may be my longest episode yet and it's the anniversary episode, even though it's like two weeks late. Anyway, thanks so much for listening. As always, if you found some benefit here, I you know. I'm grateful for that, and I hope it's through me rather than from me, and I hope you come back. Take care.