For the longest time when I was a kid, I had a desire to fit in and be just like everyone else. I noticed that people did have individual quarks that made them interesting in their own way, but every strange quark that I had [the Star Wars, Harry Potter, the finding a new word in the dictionary to learn everyday, spending my evenings watching Star Trek and Anime] turned my classmates off.
I wish I could wrap my brain around how the mind of a middle school student works. Even while I was there, I couldn't figure out why people couldn't just be different and why I felt so miserable being different.
I went to a school that was pretty much all African-American. My best friend was half Mexican/Puerto Rican and there was one boy in my class who was biracial but overall, mostly black. It was a Catholic school so these were all the same children I'd been sitting in class with since fourth grade everyday all day.
Often, when we got into 7th and 8h grade, we'd start to read books about slavery, the civil rights movement, and all that stuff and how the world would be a better place if we all learned to accept people for their differences.
Even as a 12 year old I thought to myself "why not apply that logic to everything?". Of course, it was brilliant, so I set off to be different and be accepted for being different by my classmates.
Sadly things didn't go as planned.
To be truthful, some of the boys in my class took a friendly liking to me for collecting Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. We discussed WWE and the latest episode of Dragon Ball Z or Yu-Yu Hakusho that had aired. The girls in my class were totally put off by it though.
Despite my desire to be different, I didn't want to end up being rejected by my classmates so I did something drastic - I joined the cheerleading team.
I thought all the movies lied. I thought that being a cheerleader would only help me look a bit more normal, but no, even my classmates were starting to look past my weirdness and put up with me and talk to me.
Of course, cheerleading didn't last very long. Going to practice soon became a decision about whether I should go there and stretch and jump around for 2 hours, or whether or not I wanted to watch Vegeta get his ass kicked by Android 18 and see Yusuke blast Elder Tuguro into next week.
The choice was obvious.
So I quit. After that I was a weirdo, quitter in my class. But I had my best friend and she turned me onto something cool - Rock music.
Before I listened to it, I didn't listen to much at all. Pretty much whatever nonsense came on the local rap station on the radio or whatever my mom listened to - neither of which really tickled my fancy.
The first time I listened to Linkin Park I was like "where have you been all my life?". After that I gained an obsession with Green Day [after my year long Orlando Bloom and Lord of the Rings obsession which is a really scary place to be in] and after that, I didn't care.
I didn't care that I was weird and different and a nerd, you know? There were worse things I could be - addicted to crack, a prostitute, a politician, a Sith lord, a deatheater, Nick Cage, etc.
But I was just nerd. I was just proud to be different and in middle school, different is a frightening concept to the people who are trying so hard to fit in.
In seventh grade, I was friends with a girl named Tiara. She was sweet and funny most of the time and was one of a few people who liked me being different. One day during recess [yes, we had recess in 7th grade. We also still had spelling tests.] I spent the whole day hanging out with her and her friends and I did this for an entire week. Then one day while sitting by myself content to being a weirdo, Tiara pulled off from the sidelines and said "Don't just sit there, April. You're popular now."
I was hit with the horrifying thought that if this was middle school, if I weren't popular when I got to high school, I would spend lunch sitting by myself at a cafeteria table for four years.
That was just enough shock to actually prepare me for high school which was nothing like I thought it would be. Sure there were kids who you would probably consider to be the popular kids and the nerd and jocks but, at the end of the day, everyone in my high school had come from such weird and varied background thats the fact that I loved Harry Potter and Star Wars was more fascinating than it was weird, and a lot of people were closet fans of them.
I still don't know what makes a middle school kid want to be popular and the same and just like everyone else and what changes in our brains when we get older that makes us say "it's cool to be different - it's cool to be yourself", but, to be honest, I'd never repeat middle school.
I wouldn't even visit a middle school to observe how they treat each other.
Hey, it's not like you'd want to relive the most scarring event you've ever lived through either.
Fair Thee Well,
April
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