Personal Narrative: My Life In Middle School

I left friends that I’ve known since kindergarten. So when the fourth grade started, I was completely alone. I had to get to know my surroundings, try and meet new friends, and figure out how things worked around here. Then in the seventh grade, things really went downhill. That was when everything started to change.

However, that does not mean I did not go through some sort of similar transformation. When I first came to this school I told myself that I was going to stick in my own lane and be this anti-social person. That did not last though as experiences here and even outside of my classroom experiences led to this type of change. Since the start of high school, I was this anxiety-riddled anti-social person. I had a very small group of friends and once I left high school for university that small group of friends dwindled drastically.

Attending a small school for now 5 years, I understand that most kids at my age go to a larger middle school with a graduating class of approximately 200-300 kids in their class, but going to a large school, teachers don 't have time to spend on a specific individual for many things, and I find myself lucky to get that at North Cape. Going through many situations and conflicts at North Cape led me in temporary unfortunate paths, but greatly impacted my reason to try and change to become a more successful individual in my education and life that made a permanent change. It all started 7th grade year, I wasn 't trying, it was as simple as that, until I received a suspension that was for an unnecessary conflict. I then had decided to try and get good grades and do something worth my time and put a smile on my family’s face. Because of the decision I made, things got better and made me feel better as a person, and made me realize I’m not only doing this for my family; I 'm doing it for myself.

Gross Schechter Day School was my home for 9 years, I grew up there and it helped shaped me into who I am today. Imagine this, the same 7 girls, and the same 12 boys, your whole life. You might think you would fit it with everyone, and everything would be okay. Well, you would be wrong.

As a student in elementary school, I never had very many friends. I was never invited to parties or hang outs and was always kind of left out. Sure, my classmates didn’t mean to do this to me, but the reality of it hurt. This year, I changed. I took what I had learned and I made something better out of it.

As a transfer student, it became hard to become involved in activities that could make some sort of difference to a school of 600 kids, something I was not accustomed too. The reason was the fact that everyone knew each other and that by this time everyone was a part of his or her own so-called “clique”. As a transfer student, I was basically an outcast. Nobody was coming to greet me, nor nobody bother to invite me to events. I played a sport, but those cliques were still there.

From the start, I did not feel like I “fit in”. I did not want to be around anyone. As my depression grew, my grades faltered, and I had very little interest in anything. After a series of academic failures and a period of loneliness throughout the remainder of my time in middle school, I finally told myself that this was my life and I had to take charge of it and start looking for the best things in my day to day activities. I began to think about my future and how my choices were going to shape my life as an adult.

Before every student enters high school they are told “you won't make it out with your same friend group” and every student replies “yes we will, we’re different”. The challenge I have faced is just that, losing the friends I thought would be there forever. In The Odyssey similar events take place for Odysseus multiple times, though some could say that Odysseus does not lose his men until they are killed by Zeus. The challenge I faced is similar to Odysseus’ because he and I lose friends to inappropriate behavior and tough decisions.

There’s no doubt that being an eighth grader has many challenges. In the passage ‘The Challenges of Being an Eighth grader’ states that, “Because of the boatloads of homework we seem to get, and after-school activities galore, if one of your friends has different classes than you then you may rarely get to see them” (Jenkins 14). That means that we get a lot of work as eighth graders and not as much free time to see our friends from the year before. Another statement said, “Many [students] are afraid that their family will embarrass them at a school function” (Jenkins 14).

For instance, after graduating from high school, I began to lose friends. During those four years of education, I was able to make an assortment of friends. These people came from a large spectrum of society. Most of them were either Black, White, Hispanic,Asian, and multicultural.

During my middle school life I have not been the most friendly person there is, I mean yeah I goof around a lot and do still talk to a lot of people but I still can not consider most of them my friends. Because what is the big point in making a million friends but then just losing them as soon as you hit high school. Also think for a minute too how many of your one million friends in middle school were truly there for you when you need them.

Moving from a girl’s school to a mixed one was already a chock for me. Because of those persons who don’t know a single thing about me, who barely talked to me once or twice, and was still judging me by the way I get dressed or even what kind of friends in other schools I was hanging out with, I was constantly being highly defensive and wary with anyone at the Salésien. The fact that I had only one true friend in this new school wasn’t making things easy, for sure! I had to make a lot of efforts to be good with new people while still being myself, which was a lot of work to me. For 10 months, I had to persuade myself every morning of a weekday that I’m about to have a great day at school, which was almost never the case, regrettably.

The flight took 16 hours, technically 2 days, We’re almost to the shore of California beach, California looks so beautiful from up here, all the light scattered across the ground. We finally got off the plane, my dad which I haven’t seen in years drove us to an apartment, 3 days after Meadowbrook Middle School starts teaching, for those 3 days we went around and eat new food, greet the neighbors. The first day of a new school in years, I’m shy, so I couldn’t make any friends, it was just me and my sister for the few first weeks, during that time I lost all connections with my Vietnamese friends, they all left my group chat and I never knew why. I couldn’t make new friends, I never had to, I was in my old school my whole life, friends come and go, they usually approach my group (the whole class because the school was small) and that’s how I made new friends, but now seeing that I’m the only one without a group, I was scared that they wouldn’t accept me.

The past four years of my life hold both my highest of highs and my lowest of lows. High school can be a very awkward time period in a person’s life. Four years ago, I made the intimidating switch from St. Mary’s School to Algoma High School. There were certain aspects of high school which made me nervous, but academics was not one of them. I learned how to be a responsible student in my earlier years, and school had always come relatively easy to me.

I guess this was part of adapting to the new schooling life but anyway my schoolmates were not making adaptation any easier. To me, every single moment in the school was completely worth it. I treated every moment as a propeller towards success. Every move inside the school compound had repercussions but I figured staying out of everybody’s path and focusing on education is all that mattered.