Middle school is a magical time in every persons life-- this is what they tell you anyway. But really, we all know that middle school is an awkward, uncomfortable time that you just have to live through once and try to forget afterwards. It's not all bad, of course. You make great friends and have plenty of good times, but overall, it's definitely not one of the best parts of life. Fortunately, you just have to go through three years of weirdness before you get to leave that part of your life behind. Unfortunately, there are still a few items you can't shake from this award period. Here is a list of a few of the things that will always remind you of your time in junior high.

1. Your Yearbook Photo

Okay, so you’ll probably look back in ten years and be mortified by your high school year book pictures too, but nothing is ever as bad as the ones from your middle school years. For some reason, the three years you spent in middle school were also the three years of your life that you had yet to master a hair brush and straightener, not to mention your very questionable fashion choices. Not to mention your braces and the glasses you though were cute and quirky but in retrospect just look plain ugly. It’s always disappointing to look at your middle school picture because you know at the time, you thought you looked great. You put a lot of effort into looking awesome in that picture, but just two or three years later, that same photo is stuffed in a box under your bed called “Do Not Open”.

2. Your Diary

When you were in middle school, this sacred book was exclusively used to confide your deepest darkest love secrets. If you’ve ever looked back at anything you wrote down during this time, you’ve experienced the weird embarrassing feeling of looking back on all the crushes you had for three years. I would write lists of the guys I thought were cute at school and then I would rank them from best boyfriend material to worst. It was solely based on looks and popularity and had absolutely nothing to do with personality. Your crushes from middle school are always extremely embarrassing because of how shallow they are, but they do make for an entertaining evening of reading.

3. Your Fashion Choices

It doesn’t matter how cool you were back in the day—looking back on it, you clothes from middle school are probably some of the worst decisions you ever made. Sure, all those Hollister shirts were super trendy at the time, but we’ve all come to realize since how stupid they really were. I’m most embarrassed by the shorts I used to wear when I was in junior high. In order to follow the dress code, they were all horribly long, going all the way down to my knees. Not to mention the terrible patterns—from orange plaid to green stripes. Fortunately, most of us got all of our terrible fashion urges out of the way in junior high, so hopefully by college, we’ll be done making mistakes completely.

4. Old School Projects

With my good grades (very easy to achieve in junior high) and stellar attendance record, I thought I was a genius in middle school. And while I still think I’m a genius, I have since realized, after looking at my old English essays from seventh grade, that I was not some super-student in middle school. When looking back on old papers and assignments, you realize how ridiculous some of the things you wrote were when you were trying to sound smart. When I read old essays, I’m always embarrassed at how pretentious I sounded in order to impress my teachers. I got good grades, but looking back, I can’t believe how dumb some of my papers were. It is always funny to read them now, though, and my old art projects are less embarrassing then they are adorable.

5. Your Old Beauty Products

Let’s face it—no one knows how to do their make up in middle school. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into honing your craft because you’ll always look back and feel embarrassed at how terrible your blush and eye shadow really looked. I am most ashamed at all the lip gloss I accumulated. In middle school, lip gloss is the safest way to experiment because it’s extremely hard to mess it up—all you have to do is swipe it on your lips. However, I definitely went overboard. I was obsessed with lip glosses from Bath & Bodyworks—all sorts of different flavors, from Lemonade to Marshmallow. I always had about three or four of them in my back pack, and I would reapply every 15 minutes without fail. It didn’t even look good—it really only made me look like I smeared Vaseline on my lips. I still have them lying around my bathroom, half-empty shells of colorful goop with no real purpose. I recently gave them to my younger sister, so she could make the same bad beauty mistakes that I did.