Personal Narrative: Transitioning From Elementary School To Middle School

Everyone strives to be accepted and loved. Acceptance is wanted at any age. From my high school friends to my elders who work a nine to five job, some still crave to be accepted by their peers. The world we live in is full of expectations that people are suppose to live up to. These expectations can bully people into changing themselves. I too changed myself to be accepted by my peers. In end I learned a valuable lesson. Changing yourself for others, so they will accept you, only leaves yourself unhappy and miserable. It is better to stay true to yourself and be loved by your closest peers because those people are the only ones that truly matter in your life.
Transitioning from elementary school to middle school was very difficult for me. I
went from seeing my best friends every day to suddenly having no familiar faces in my classes. I was a curly headed weird and sarcastic person. When one of my peers made a joke, I laughed the loudest. When one of my peers spoke to me, I always had a witty comeback. I loved many things at that age, but what stood out to me was my music. I loved pop music that involved boy bands. From One Direction to The Wanted, boy bands was what I loved. People knew I loved boy bands, and they categorized me as uncool for it. If you weren’t into punk rock music, you were considered lame. Even my own best friend stopped liking boy bands because they were considered lame. Every day I would go home and cry to mother. My peers at school did not want to engage with me and my best friends no longer wanted anything to do with me. People made fun of my curly hair and called me annoying for expressing my opinions. I was outsider for being myself. From that day on I vowed to do anything in my power to change myself for the better. What I didn’t know was in reality I was slowly tearing down my self love. I began to change my clothes to what my peers expected of me. I threw away my colorful and creative clothing and replaced it with flannels and ripped jeans. I downloaded all the punk rock albums I could find and began to straighten my hair everyday. I became a new person and suddenly I was apart of the cool crowd. I truly thought I was happier by deleting everything that was unique about me.
Seventh grade was the worst year of my life.
I continued to hide myself by keeping up the expectations for my peers. My once voluminous curly hair was now flat and damaged from being straightened every day. My clothes were now changed to button down collared shirts and skinny jeans because those were the new trends of the year. I disliked my clothes, but I told myself that this is what people expected of me. If I wanted to be accepted I had to swallow my pride and not complain. I slowly became very quiet at school. I stopped talking to my peers and I started sitting by myself at lunch. I became depressed. I wondered why people would not like me for me. I questioned why I was so unlikeable. My solution was that it was my fault. Once I believed this, I started to hate myself. I hated the way I talked. I hated the way I looked. I hated everything about myself. I was so hateful about myself, I stopped being my true self at home and started acting how I acted at school. The one person who noticed this change was my sister. One day, she came up to me and told me she heard me crying in my room. I tried to lie, but she quickly shut me down asking me what was wrong. That day was the day that I broke down and finally expressed all the feelings I had bottled up. I cried for hours explaining everything that I went through throughout those two years. She comforted me and told me, “If you aren’t true to yourself then who are you? Why are you pleasing people who have nothing to do with
your life?” She was right. I was working so hard to please people who I would probably forget throughout my life. I was wasting my time. From day forward, I worked every day to improve myself and accept who I was without judgment.
Now I am sixteen. I am happier I have ever been. I have true friends who love me for me. They love my crazy curly hair and my witty sarcastic comebacks. Although I have grown out of my crazy love for boy bands, I still love music very much. I am more true to myself than I have ever been and I am loved for that. The people who dislike me are brushed off my shoulder without a second thought. In the end I learned that “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not” (André Gide).