A 12-year-old girl is told that she is wise for her age. She jabbers with adults about President Obama, 60 Minutes, and college. She then goes into a bustling room of her peers and she’s silent. Her words are empty and her heart is racing. She is terrified. She is terrified that they will judge her and won’t understand what she is talking about. She stays silent and builds a wall around herself. She sits at lunch at a dirty table in her middle school cafeteria. She doesn’t want friends. She automatically assumes that others are less mature than her so she blocks out everyone. She doesn’t want friends because she believes they will never understand her. She’s reminded of how she used to be social in younger years, and she’s told to break out of her comfort zone and make friends. Teachers come up to her and express their concerns about high school and how it would be very difficult because of her antisocial tendencies. She wondered if she’d be happy in high school.

All of the adults agree that her standoffish personality would be detrimental in high school and they expected that she wouldn’t be able to communicate with her peers easily. They believed in her intellectual ability and they believed in her success. They believed in her, but they were worried for her. She went to the same school since kindergarten with almost all the same people and by then, all the girls had already formed their own groups. The girls all looked the same; their hair, clothes, and skin was perfect. She could never amount to anything such as that. Everyone immediately partnered up after the teacher announced that we would be picking our partners for a group project. She would then come up to the teachers desk and quietly beg to work alone, and they of course gave in out of pity. There would be times when my peers used to walk up to her desk with a smirk on their face, “hey Sierra, want to be my partner?”

I wouldn’t know what to say, as no one had ever asked me to be their partner, but before I could get my words out they would run off to their friends laughing about a cruel joke that I didn’t get at the time. `When it came near to the first day of high school, I panicked. All of the adults were telling me that it was going to be tough, and if middle school was bad for me I should be definitely be concerned about high school. Believe it or not, I now have tons of friends in high school, more than I’ll ever “need”. I proved them wrong. I decided to change. I decided to get out of my comfort zone. I decided to be vulnerable. I made a decision that has made me who I am today.