Dear Former Classmates,

First and foremost congratulations on being able to maintain normality for your entire life! Seems to have brought you a lot of success-- on Instagram. You've managed to obey societal cues so well that at this point it's so unfortunately easy to group the majority of you together into something to write about. There was even a pop-culture term coined to describe the phenomenon. Congratulations on being basic.

Secondly, I apologize for the bitterness. I spent a lot of my youth trying to find a way to avoid following in the judgmental foot steps of my peers, but I seem to have failed. In failing though, I gained a certain understanding of the feelings behind judgment. It's more than just being afraid of the "Other," it's a resentment of it. By being judgmental of all of you in the same way you were towards myself and countless other "weird" kids, I finally understood that you didn't hate me solely because I was weird.

Most of the time the weird kid is hated simply because the ones who hate them are resentful of their unwillingness to assimilate to the rules in the way they had to. The weird kid is resented because of the freedom they have, because of the confidence they gain from it, and because they know they are being judged by the normal masses, but it still doesn't change their weirdness.

And that is exactly why thirdly, I would like to thank all of you. Thank you for making me feel awful about myself in every way possible. Thank you for calling me names. Thank you for walking away from me. Thank you for pointing and whispering and laughing. And I especially thank you for reminding me every day that I was still weird, and that I wouldn't fit in. I thank you because if it weren't for all of this I wouldn't have built any confidence.

I now understand that many of you did not hate the weird kids, you envied that. And you will likely deny that even today because, logically, why would you ever want to be the gross kid with almost no friends? You wish you were the gross kid with almost no friends because that kid is the one who knows how to be a person. You never learned how to be a person, you learned how to be a sheep and you were so damn good at it. You're probably still fantastic at it. But a skill is a skill, props on your ability to follow the rules.

Lastly, I would like to make amends. I feel as though I missed out on some cool conversations just because both of us were still afraid of crossing the social boundaries. I resent that more than anything, more than I ever resented the people on the other side of the boundaries. I hope I'm not the only person who feels that way, and I hope that everyone teaches the younger kids that there is no need for those boundaries. There is no need for dividing the weird and normal into categories. There is no reason for us to value one personality over the other. Please keep that in mind the next time you're being judgmental.

Sincerely,

The Weird Kid