Self-Consciousness In High School

To a 13-year-old teenager in high school, who you are means everything. You are the outfit you decide to wear to school, the way your hair sits on your head, the way you read a passage in class, and the speed at which you walk in the halls. Other students know when you wear the same shirt twice, get a bad and embarrassing haircut, or mispronounce a word while you read a passage aloud, and they will call you out for it. They will comment on the attributes that you are most sensitive about—ones you may not be able to control—making you dread walking in the halls alone. Self-consciousness develops with every move you make and every word you say. High school is the time and place in which kids are unkind and gossip seems like everyone’s main concern. Cruel comments gradually

We exhaustingly spent the last month of high school counting down the days until we would look into the sky and lock eyes on caps thrown up in the air. As I sat in class anticipating the bell for lunch, a message from the random boy in my ninth grade science class flashed onto the screen of my phone. I took a glimpse to discern text saying, “In high school, you were still my friend no matter what anyone said about me, and I can’t thank you enough for that,” followed by, “You don’t know how much I felt like giving up.” Suddenly, I became conscious of his urgency to gather supplies for our project in ninth grade, his consistency in seating choices, his large number of absences, and his gradual switch from homemade lunch to school lunch to no lunch at all. At thirteen years old, I held little awareness of how my actions could impact someone’s life. Evidently, the insecurity that persisted in him disappeared. I fostered the confidence in somebody—somebody taking a breath at this very instant. I unintentionally removed the pain in this child’s heart by speaking up and being a