When I was in sixth grade, I was your average geeky, glasses-wearing, big tee-shirt-sporting, pants rolling 11-year-old, fresh off my first conscious experience with death.

My grandmother--my babysitter and good friend--passed away that summer after a prolonged and painful bout with cancer. She lived with us, and I watched her die for months. If nothing else, the experience scared the living daylights out of me and left a scar I can still see today.

I remember a conversation I had with her when she was still lucid. I was lying down on the floor and she was sitting in her rocking chair, wrapped in her winter parka (she was always cold). I told her what I learned in my fifth grade class about Operation Desert Storm. We talked about the war in the Persian Gulf and how senselessly evil Saddam Hussein seemed to be at the time. She told me he hated for no good reason. That he hurt people for no reason other than he didn't like the fact they existed.

"Some people will just hate you for who you are," I remembered her saying.

That's always something I've refused to believe, but on many occasions found to be absolutely true.

Sixth grade was exemplary--girls openly telling me they hated me for no other reason than I was breathing the same air as they--and because I wanted to be friends with them.

In art class, one girl painted a black heart on her leg and etched a little message that she hated me next to it. She also noted earlier that day that she wanted to shave my head with my skate blade.

She started hating me the moment I refused to switch project topics with her in social studies class. We had been assigned countries to research, and I was fairly assigned Taiwan. I wanted to do it. She had Malaysia, and had never even heard of the place.

There have been many more occasions in my lifetime when I've had similar experiences. When I hear or sense that people dislike or even hate me--whether it be because I have a certain job, or I date a certain person or because I have a certain ability--and they don't bother to get to know me, hang out with me or even say a word to me...Instead they spread rumors about me that are baseless and untrue. I get blamed for things I didn't and wouldn't ever do.

I am forced into an uncomfortable reality: that it's completely out of my control. I can't do a f-ing thing about it. Their problem, not mine.

But I suffer for it too.

My grandmother never told me that there was anything I could do about it. She only shrugged that night.

"You live your life."