Personal Narrative: The Ways I Lie

When I was in high school, times were very difficult. I didn’t have many friends and I had issues that I had to deal with. I never understood why I didn't have many friends. I would talk to people and try to start a conversation. But, most people would shut me out. It hurt my self-confidence. I wondered if people didn’t like me very much. I think they thought I was a loser. I worked hard in school and did what I was supposed to do. I wanted my teachers to like me and I loved my family. But my classmate didn’t want anything to do with me. I felt like an outcast. When I would talk to people about their day, they would usually do the following, look at me with a confused or disgusted face and then talk to their friends that they knew. They would talk a lot and often I was genuinely interested in what they were saying. I would try to join the conversation. They would ignore me and talk amongst themselves, “… the sort of lie… in which loyalty to the group has become more important than any other value…” (Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie pg.164), Groupthink pretty much defined my high

They only cared about themselves and rejected me as a person. All I wanted was to be a friend that people liked to be around. All that ended up happening was that all four years were damaging to my well-being. I went alone to my senior prom. I never had a girlfriend and I never went to any parties. “I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. “- (Cimamanda Adichie, The Dangers of a Single Story) Adichie felt the same discomfort that I did, she felt alien. She experienced people making preconceived notions about who she was before they even meet her. People had preconceived notions of me as