When I hit middle school, I think people thought I had developed an eating disorder. This wasn’t due to the fact that I wasn’t eating, per say, but the fact that I would skip lunch and eat when I got home in the afternoon (often 4PM ish but when I was playing soccer I’d sometimes skip entirely and just eat dinner). It was not like I was intentionally starving myself in order to be thin. Compared to the other girls in middle school I was kind of a big freak of nature. I was 5’7 by the time I hit sixth grade and my weight was accordingly fit for an average built girl of that size.
My fellow seventh grade girls, unfortunately, were all like 5’5 and ninety-pounds.
Something about me set the girls off in middle school where they felt the need to exclude me and not be my friend. I’d be excluded from conversations and no one took pity on me in my awkward tom-boy ways to send out an invite. After perhaps the first month at school, I just learned to go to the library on lunch and either read or do homework.
Which probably explains why I am a fairly fast reader.
By the time I hit high school, I had transferred schools, tired of the petty and childish ways of my classmates at that school, and was ready to go to a public high school where there was a larger crowd of people where I could potentially meet someone to have lunch with. Unfortunately, I let the pattern happen again. I’d skip lunch and eat when I got home since I couldn’t find a group to sit with.
During the second half of my sophomore year in high school, I decided (well, I had applied during the fall and got accepted) to move to Japan for a year. It was one of the scariest things I had ever done, being horribly shy and a REALLY picky eater at the time. I found, in their culture, I was actually a very loud individual, comparatively, and had my share of lunch buddies due to the fact I was a foreigner and they wanted to hear all about America. Upon my return, it was the second term of my junior year and all the social cliques had been established and I was not welcome.
Even as an adult, it is really hard for me to get to know people. I think it is part I exude some sort of air which tells people to back off; another part, I’m really quiet and shy; and finally I don’t like to take the first step. I have, on occasion, taken the first step to introduce myself to people who seem really similar in nature to me and have found wonderful friends because of it, but overall it is really hard for me to make friends. I’m not overly outgoing but once someone cracks the shell and befriends me, they will have the loyal friend who is there for life. In Phoenix I was able to find friends through school mostly and here in Florida seven months later I haven’t really made any friends outside of work.
So, besides moving to a foreign country taking away all my familiarity with my surroundings, how can I be social?
Will you have lunch with me?
Technorati Tags: awkward youth, middle school, junior high, high school, adulthood, making friends, social, being social, friends, meeting people, meet people, new cities, lunchtime, lunch
4 Comments
I totally can relate. Maybe not the exact same situations but similar ones. I went from being in the same school from age 2 to 7th grade and knowing all the same people the entire time, to a different private school in 8th grade where I knew nobody and nobody seemed to like me. There were a few nice people in my class that seemed to try to include me (pretty much 2 girls and one boy) but when we’d get in a social situation with others then I became the quiet, weird one. I ended up becoming friends with a few 7th graders instead and ate lunch with them – which didn’t help my “rep” anyway lol. I have a hard time making friends, I really only have a close-knit group here in Kansas and otherwise I have a few online. I wish I had advice for you for getting friends outside of, say, work but I’m not sure – other than talking to people. I find I meet people best through friends of friends and things like that. Do get-togethers and tell people to bring a friend, things like that.
@DESIREE haha long lost sister.
Yeah I try to engage my co-workers in hanging out but mostly it is us going out and hanging out with Mack’s co-workers and doing dinner or just generally b.s.ing. I’ve been trying to push myself beyond my comfort zone and be social but there are times I’m just like, hide in the apartment.
i think it’s probably coupled with the fact I’m really, really missing Seattle right now and all my friends and family there to it heightens the loneliness and anti-social feelings.
Thanks for the comment. I’m glad I’m not alone.
yeah, I was the same way from about 5th grade on (which is when I was stuck in a different school from my two best friends with whom I had previously spent all lunches and recesses). I would actually eat my lunch most days, but after that and during all other breaks, you could find me reading in the library, assuming anyone bothered to look. In fact, I seem to recall one or two lunches in high school where you and I ended up in there together
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Not sure how many of the details I’ve told you about the move here, but let me tell you: going to five different schools over the course of only three years can really screw up your social life. Ironically though, the school at which I was the most miserable was the one where I had the most “friends”. For the first time in my life, I was accepted into the popular group, and I hated it. None of the others seemed to really care about me as a person and whenever I was around them I got the impression that they just befriended me to shore up their numbers. Like the first commentator, I was the “weird one” in the group, or at least that’s how I felt. Basically the first real, lasting friendship I made after 5th grade was with this really weird girl who came up to me in the gym bleachers at a school event, sat down, and started talking to me. I wonder who that was?
I have no clue who that person was but I must say this: they sound pretty damn awesome.