Katherine is a sophomore and assistant editor of the Features section. This is her second year on the Gazette staff.
She merely choked on the pit of a cherry and ended up with her nickname.
Katherine Wilson, a sophomore at Granite Bay High School, is the epitome of the expression ‘you are what you eat’.
“I was fine with my name, it just kind of didn’t fit me,” Wilson said. “I really like cherries, and one day I was on FaceTime with a few of my friends and I was eating some (cherries) in a bowl and I forgot to spit out the pit and started choking, I was fine ... but they started calling me cherry.”
Moving from Michigan to Ohio and finally settling in California, she remains in contact with her distant friends and family, but what continues to stick with Wilson is the wide variety of experience she acquired in her early childhood.
“I kind of was moving all over the place,” Wilson said. “So, I’ve been to plenty of different schools.”
Wilson’s receptive mindset coupled with her positive attitude has allowed her to persevere in the face of hardship and adversity.
“My older sister has down syndrome … and growing up … I was kind of raised as the babysitter for her,” Wilson said. “In the end game, it’s been such a contributing factor to my life, I’ve grown mature over it and I’ve been able to become a leader and someone who’s been able to deal with stress because obviously, sometimes it is a little stressful.”
Aside from Wilson’s previous childhood experiences, she continues to diversify her perspective in participating in different groups on campus.
“I am in swim, cheer, choir, journalism, last year I was on the volleyball team and I used to be a Girl Scout,” Wilson said.
Wilson is not foreign to the subjection of stereotypes, just as many other teens are given labels such as ‘loner’, ‘jock’, ‘weeb’, ‘emo’, ‘class clown’ or ‘ginger’.
“I’ve been stereotyped as ‘the dumb blonde’ or ‘the nerd’, because I have glasses, or ‘the popular girl’,” Wilson said. “There’s lot of stigmas about cheer ... but no one on my team is a ‘dumb blonde’.”
According to Wilson, someone involved in both programs, groups with opposing stigmas, such as ‘introverted choir kids’ and ‘popular cheerleaders’, do not differ as much as they seem.
“There’s definitely differences ... but we’re all the same, really nothing is incredibly different about us,” Wilson said. “If we came together and we all just realized that we kind of like similar things, there wouldn’t be such a big stigma about differences.”
Wilson recently received the most inspirational award on the swim team and continues to exemplify perseverance in stressful situations on campus.
“I started late on the (swim) team, and I started like two months already in ,” Wilson said. “So I joined, and it was scary ... because I had never done it before ... but I slowly rose and got better because I continued to stay even after it was embarrassing how slow I was.”
The attitude that Wilson approaches her everyday life with is translated into her perspective on school and her origin in journalism.
“I would rather be in classes I enjoy than in classes that will make me stress,” Wilson said. “I was recommended to join (journalism), it was so much fun and ... it’s so nice being able to express your thoughts and have it shared out to the public and knowing that people read it.”
As she continues to face the world, she does so with the tender and sweet understanding of the outer composition of a cherry and the will as strong as a pit.
