Popularity is for Mediocre People What is popularity? Is popularity a real thing or is it just an imaginary ranking that helps distinguish the socially acceptable kids from the socially awkward kids? Popularity isn’t dumb when you’re considered “popular” but it sure is stupid when you’re not popular. Even before I was able to walk my parents always said I was a very calm but a happy baby. Always smiling and waving at strangers from my stroller and I never had a problem with strangers holding me. Even now my parents tease me telling me how easy it could have been for someone to kidnap me. From my very first memories I remember making friends everywhere I went. If I went to the grocery store I’d make a friend. If I went to the doctor I would made a friend. It didn’t matter where I went I made friends, it was easy for me. My family members constantly remind me of how charismatic and caring I was as a child. I was the kid that volunteered to help show new kids around my school just so I could be their first friend at a new school. It's silly now that I think about it, but I loved making new friends. So what changed? In 2005, I was in third grade my mom was pregnant with my sister Celena. Our house was too small for another child so my parents decided to buy a new house on the other side of town. I had mixed feeling about it but I hadn't given it much thought because it was a new house, everyone was thrilled and excited. I didn't expect my parents to take me out of my elementary school and move me to the one closest to our new house. Bemis Elementary School, home of the bobcats, was my first exposure to this mind poisoning idea of “popularity”. I hadn't given much thought to popularity previous to my fourth grade year. Of course I’d seen it in the movies but I’d never quite understood it because my
friends in my other elementary school didn’t classify anyone into these popularity ranks. I was 9 for God’s sake what did I know? It’s funny because the first day of school at Bemis Elementary was embarrassing because I didn’t go. I wasn’t transferred correctly and I never got enrolled so I missed the first day and had to go the second day. First off, my fourth grade teacher was an awful, temperamental, and incredible aggressive teacher. She was a little hefty, had really greasy hair, and her glasses were always dark like the ones made to change when you’re out in the sun yet she never went outside. The kids in my class were hooligans, they once put thumbtacks on my teacher's chair and she nearly ripped all our heads off. Which eventually led to her getting fired. Nonetheless, there were popular kids. I like to say it was just like in Mean Girls, kind of cliché really but I was Cady and Brandy, Janelle, and Julia were the infamous plastics. I don’t know how I got included into their clique but somehow I did. Janelle remembered me from church and she befriended me right away. It was all awfully strange but I made it into the plastics and sure enough slowly but surely, I became one. The problem with popularity is that it goes to your head. It really is like poison that numbs out common sense and the part in your brain that tells you not to be stupid to fit in. The most haunting memory I have from my fourth grade year was when a girl named Abigail moved to our class and she didn’t fit in, no one wanted to be her friend. I went from the kid that volunteered to help new kids to the kid that teased them for being new. I made no move to be her friend and I sure didn’t tell my friends to stop taunting her. Till this day I hate myself for making fun of her.
While we were out during recess one day we were all sitting under the trees in the field because it was a particularly hot spring day and it was too hot to play on the hot rubber playground, not that it mattered because we were to “cool” to play in the playground anymore. The grass had just been mowed that day so it smelled incredible (I’ve always liked that smell). I had been making a flower crown out of the flowers that spring up by the trees. When I looked up I spotted Abigail a couple yards from us by a tree grabbing handfuls of the freshly cut grass mounds and stuffing them in her pockets. I was thinking I was superior and had a right to embarrass her apparently because I pointed her out to my friends. We had a good laugh and then someone yelled out, “she thinks she’s a cow!” That got everyone laughing but I knew things were about to be taken too far. That’s when everyone started yelling out, at the same time, “COW!” “HEY COW!” “ARE YOU HUNGRY, DID LUNCH NOT SATISFY YOUR HUNGER COW?” Poor Abigail, the victim of my uncalled for cruelty, looked up when she realized they were talking to her. I remember seeing her eyes well up with tears and turn bright red. The worst part was that she made eye contact with me that couldn’t have lasted more than 10 seconds but felt like the eye contact lasted 30 years, finally she broke it when she ran away crying. That’s when Brandy turned to me saying, “why aren’t you in on our fun, do you want to be her friend or something?” she scoffed at me, really disapproving. (After all, she never liked me because I had the same shoes as her, imagine that!) So I obviously tried to save my own ass and “popularity” and said the thing that I still feel guilty for to this day: “No, I was thinking that since her name sounds like gill, like a fish, and she probably saves that grass to eat at home like a cow she’s a ‘cowfish’.” I am still so guilty and sorry for that because from that day on everyone called her ‘cowfish’. I had been warped into one of them. However, later on that year I convinced everyone Abigail was a good person and she wasn’t weird at all, the grass she took from the field was for
her baby bunny. So everyone became her friend. She even became the closest thing to becoming my best friend at Bemis until she moved that same school year over the summer. Karma, let me tell you a little something about karma kids, it literally does come back to bite you in the butt. Karma is a funny little thing. It doesn’t matter whether karma gets you 2 seconds after your bad deed or 50 years after it, it will, without a doubt come and get you. As a child no one thinks their life can be flipped upside down in a matter of weeks. I sure didn’t, moving schools is tough, but moving states is in a whole different league. Middle school is a strange and awkward stage for everyone. Middle school is when I started think for myself and I started trying find out who I was. August 6, 2011, the day we arrived to Texas. It wasn’t until the first night, in our new house in my new room alone with my thoughts, that I realized how badly I’d been influenced by my so called “friends” for four years. I should have seen it long before that because the day we left was the day school started for my former middle school and no one even bothered to come by and say goodbye. The only thing that can make that hard is moving states and starting 8th grade at a entirely new environment. I must admit, it was very strange and I expected immediate popularity because I was on top my entire life. What would make Classical Center at Brandenburg Middle School any different or special (besides the name of course)? August 27, 2011. The first day of school. Only one word could describe that day: atrocious. That day will go down as one of the most humiliating, terrifying, and confusing days of my life. First of all, I had no idea school started 8:40 a.m. in GISD and I got there precisely at 7:00 a.m. I get to school already upset just to be told that I’m way too early, and I have to wait
outside because students aren’t allowed into the school that early. Second of all, I was out of dress code because my uniform shirt was too close to being a marron rather than an acceptable red. Then, I didn’t make any friends everyone already had their posse and I was the lone wolf, except I wasn’t nearly as brave or fierce. And lastly, while walking home I got lost and I ended up getting home an hour late, leaving my parents think I’d gotten kidnapped because I lived two blocks away. Popularity is a strange thing, I expected it like it belonged to me. I made friends, and they were good people but I still missed my “status” at my old school. I guess the old saying “bad habits die hard” is true because I felt superior and judged everyone secretly. How dare I really? I was no one to these kids and I felt better than them? The day I left Brandenburg was the day I felt like I was escaping from hell, but there was a lot in store for my pretentious snobby inner self. Sometimes I think life hasn't been all that fair to me. I can go on a long list of reasons why I didn’t deserve what I got, but I accept it because I know I'm not and wasn’t a perfect person. It’s humiliating to know you’re not wanted. It’s humiliating to be laughed at. It’s humiliating to feel like you’ll never amount to anything. If I could pinpoint the exact time my anxiety attacks got worse, it would be freshman year of high school. I thought that after living in Texas for a year, everything would be easier and I’d fit in. I’d find my posse and we would be a close and stay under the radar, getting through high school like that. However, there was that part inside of me that still seeked popularity, and in all honestly… there still is.
As if humilation hadn’t been enough the year before. Walking into lunch felt like walking down a runway wearing a meat suit and the audience was a group of starving hyenas. Every time I got turned down when tried to sit at a table felt like Mean Girls. My pride took a beating that day. The thought of eating in the restroom started becoming appealing up until I realized I didn’t know where they were. I hadn’t bothered to notice. That day I sat with the “undesirables.” I got home and cried till I fell asleep. My pride and self entitlement was conquered and slaughtered that day. I’ve always loved school, I loved the social part and I wasn’t all that bad at the learning part either. I didn’t began to deteste school until that very day. I screamed at God in desperation as to why he would make me go through all that embarrassment and once again I began to hate my parents for making us move. I hated them so much for something they couldn’t even begin to understand because I wouldn’t tell them. I hated the fact that no one cared much for my existence. I hated myself for being mean to the kids years before that. I hated Texas simply for existing, but most of all I hated myself for bringing all of it upon myself. It hurt terribly to have to admit that my mentality had been wrong and it had been corrupted in the worst way possible. Sometimes the most painful thing is to open your eyes. It took three years to reopen mine. To return to my former self. I tried hard to become humble and understanding. I started reading and trying hard in school like I had done before my being was poisoned. I’ve matured to some extent where I feel comfortable with myself and who I am. I feel like I will never stop learning from these humiliating tuning points in my life.