A time I didn’t fit in

Let’s face it. Being a teenager isn’t easy. You’re going through changes, attempting to find your place, and trying to fit in. High school was not my scene. Is it really anybody’s scene, though? The first thing you’re taught in orientation is to make friends. So you go off and join a club, or a sports team. I was already a competitive cheerleader with a program outside of school, so I couldn’t join anything super time consuming. What’s more of an individual based sport? Oh! Cross Country should be perfect for me! Okay: Join a Sports team? Check. What’s next? The next thing they teach you in orientation is to never fall behind on your class work, but to also take as many college courses as you can before actually going off to college. Okay: Load up on extra courses? Check. So I’ve joined a high school sport’s team on top of an already competitive cheerleading program, and I’ve loaded up on class work. Should be fairly easy. Boy was I wrong.

High school quickly became a game of “how many balls can I juggle at once and ultimately drop on the floor in a failed attempt to add another ball into the mix”. I filled my plate to the very top, and what did I do when it came time to sit at the table? I dropped the plate. Being a part of a cross country team that ran 5 miles every single day, while simultaneously trying to make it to cheer practice which took place for 3 hours everyday, and finish all of my homework before the next school day quickly revealed to me how I so desperately needed more hours in the day. Well, either that or a second me to fill in when I needed a nap.

I was busy. Busier than I thought I could ever be at 15 years old. And I had a rough time learning to adapt to different types of social behavior. In other words, I was awkward as hell. This resulted in people having a hard time reading me. Now to get me wrong, I had friends. Given, they were the same 5 friends I had had since the 5th grade, so they were kind of stuck with me. But they were friends, none the less. And they did stick by me when everything went down.

What went down you might ask? Well, you might have gotten a hint when I mentioned the social anxiety. I couldn’t seem to work myself around a conversation without it feeling like a train headed towards a concrete wall at 300 miles per hour; brace for impact! I just couldn’t seem to relate to my peers. I didn’t party, I didn’t go out due to all of the extra curriculars I took on, and compared to my classmates, I seemed to speak and act like a grandma who couldn’t work a computer or stay awake at the lunch table (due to some stress-induced insomnia).

The social anxiety might not have been such a bad thing, except that everyone seemed to think I was either stuck up or a bitch. At school, my classmates seemed to think I couldn’t be bothered-as if I was better than them-when really I was terrified of them! Even at cheer practice, my teammates seemed to think I was always mad, so I was constantly getting into trouble with my coaches. “Smile! Drop the attitude!”

Then, when I was asked out about a guy I was totally crushing on since the year prior asked me to be his girlfriend, I thought that maybe my social deathbed could be revived. Maybe this guy could help me learn to love my quirks and flaws, and teach everyone that I mean well, I’m just a little strange. I’ve never been more wrong.

Turns out, he asked me out because he felt pity for me after he found out that I liked him. I guess he figured he was doing me some form of charity by going out with me. For two months, I was committed to the most toxic relationship I have ever been in to date; at only 15 years old. Even as a charity service, he couldn’t seem to date me as I was, so what did he do? He changed EVERYTHING about me. I started to change the way I dressed, started curling my hair, and even started wearing make up, because it was how he preferred me to look. After a while, he didn’t even want me to eat certain foods because it would give me bad breath. We weren’t allowed to kiss until he had succeeded in shoving a piece of gun down my throat. One day, he took my glasses from my face and refused to give them back until the end of the day, because he preferred me without them. And he begged me to grow my hair out because my short hair didn’t suit me.

Let’s not even get started on the public appearance fiasco. He would ring me a new one if I didn’t sit with him and his friends at lunch, but refused to even come near my friends at lunch. At times, it almost seemed as if he was embarrassed to be seen by the more popular kids in school with me. He changed everything about me, including who saw us in public.

I grew to hate myself, because it was clear that he didn’t like me either. I had never felt more out of place than standing next to him. When he finally dumped me, everyone took his side. I never told anyone what he did during those two months-which was nothing short of toxic and confidence destroying. So, his perfect world in high school never faultered, while I felt like the punchline of the joke that everyone seemed to know, but decided not to tell me about. It was funnier that way, I suppose.

In other words, high school sucked. In all of its bitter, self esteem crushing, dream snatching, glory. Everything was a competition, and everyone was fighting to confirm to what the popular kids might deem “the status quo”. Needless to say, my social anxiety, horrendous self esteem, and weak mindedness drove me to have a pretty heinous 4 years of being the stuck up, weird girl.

I guess the moral of the story or the takeaway is this:

Never change for anyone. Not a silly boy, or people you think might be your friends. Stay true to who you are, even if it means not fitting in with the cool kids for a while. Being the punchline to the joke is never fun, but bending your morals and changing who you are is far worse, believe me. So be the odd one out. Stick to your path. And one day, far from now, you’ll look back on those days where you were all alone and realize that to walk alone in your truth was far better than to walk among a crowd filled with societal lies we were made to believe are true. And those kids who doubted you? They’ll realize they were just conforming to fit in, and what a shame that was.

Never change. Even to fit in.