A Story of a Particularly Odd Form of Discrimination

Ever since I was a little child, I showed disinterest in things which interested everyone around me tremendously. It especially happened with football. While everyone saw football as a way to bond, talk, or have fun, I simply saw it as a particularly loud lullaby to put me to sleep. I couldn't care less about it, which I later learned was a mistake in a family like mine.

There are many definitions for discrimination, but the one that I think is most accurate is, in short “Unjust treatment of a person because of their differences.” When we gathered up as a family, all uncles and aunts and their children, the women would stay together and talk, and all the men and boys would sit around the TV to watch the football game, which always appeared to be on. Every single person in front of the TV knew all 22 of the players on the field, they knew their records, their personalities, and everything else, relevant or not to the game. Everyone except for me. I would just sit around, and the more times this happened, the more the others started noticing my disinterest in the subject. Some began trying to get me interested, while others found it peculiar. Later on, it became a sort of joke of the family how oblivious I was to the game. I would say inside joke, but anybody would take the chance to tell their friends about that one kid in the family that doesn’t like football. This was still when I was around 10 years or even younger.

There is one time that I really remember when maybe it was just a bad day for the boys and men in the room. Of course, they wanted to “wash” the anger away by watching a football game. So they put one on, but their team lost. That could only mean one thing for me. Somehow they’d start provoking me about it. I was a little used to it by now, and as they’d laugh about their very original and unused jokes (major sarcasm), I’d wait for one of the grown-ups to switch the topic into something else. And they were going to, if it wasn't for my dad, topping off the wave of the jokes by saying something that I have hopefully forgotten by now. (Keep in mind that this is still when I was too young to cut my own fingernails back then). That made me instantly rush out and grab my mom and drag her out so we could go home. It wasn’t until a few hours later that my dad returned home.

Needless to say, I've stayed away from football since then. Some things stay with you, as stupid as they may be. 

:)

Bardh Ajdini