We Don’t Have to Be Confident and Together All the Time

Source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/mRR4pOSmE7E/

“At any given moment, you have the power to say: This is not how the story is going to end.” ~Christine Mason Miller

Eighth grade was a bit of a bad year for me, if I’m being honest. The dust had settled after the seventh grade popularity battle, and I had some close friends and we were mostly surviving, but there was one class I just could not make a go of.

I didn’t have any friends in the class, or rather, the one I did have made a choice to hang with the popular girls, and left me to be made fun of. It’s an understandable choice, really, if you can remember high school. I probably would have done the same had it been an option.

Those girls were pretty horrible. I can’t recall the specifics, but I remember feeling tight across the chest every time I had to walk into that room. Every class I would try my hardest to make myself smaller and more invisible, and yet their unkind words would still find their way, prickling into me.

So the next year when I took drama class as an elective, I strode into the theater and was horrified to see those girls standing there.

My drama class! They’d invaded my safe place, the haven for outgoing but also nerdish types like me! Who let them in?

I was dismayed, but I recall making a decision: …