High school is destructive to the developing mind in the sense that mostly everyone feels as if they need to fit in and be liked. Even if you know that it is not necessary, you still want to because being accepted, to put it simply, just makes you feel good.

Freshman year of high school for me was exactly that. I wanted people to like me because in middle school I did not know what it was like to fit in, and I had always been an obvious outcast.

I found out quickly that if I woke up an hour earlier every morning to spend time on my hair and makeup, I would get compliments and I would feel appreciated. To me that meant that I was liked. Being recognized was some strange euphoria for my fourteen year old self. To add, a boy that i had a crush on started talking to me, and we became friends. He flirted with me and I would blush and get nervous. It felt great to have a boy really like me. I thrived off of the feeling.

I dated said boy, and it was going well. I was definitely happy, I thought, because I had a boyfriend and had made tons of friends in my classes. These were the things that were apparently supposed to happen in high school.

I still did not really feel as if I was good enough, however, because I still was not like all of the other girls in my class. They were prettier, skinnier, more athletic, etc. I remember telling my boyfriend about my self conscious mindset, and he told me that I just had to simply try harder. At the time, this response made sense. He was right. So I tried harder.

I tried harder to be good enough for him and for everyone else at school. I did my makeup better, I fried my hair, and I tried to slim down. I did what my boyfriend wanted to do so he would be happy and have something to tell his guy friends about. I changed my personality to fit the people at school so they would ask me to hang out on the weekends.

I found that I did not really feel happy like I used to be, but somehow I made peace with that fact. The only hobby I stayed with was running, and that was enough for me to say that I was still the girl I used to be. I was not, though.

I distracted myself with running and schoolwork, slaving over both of them for hours on end. I wouldn’t realize that I was unhappy if I put so much effort into these things, I thought.

Unfortunately, I let myself go. I lost who I used to be, and it would be years until I realized this and started digging up who I was before.