It's an unfortunate situation, really.

When I was 11, I moved.

It was October. I was the new girl in a new town and a new school, starting in the middle of the year. I don't remember any of this bothering me. In fact, I have fond memories of that sixth grade year. I was smart and blond and sweet. The teacher liked me and I made friends. I didn't realize that my secondhand clothes were frowned upon and no one had the guts to tell me. Ignorance was bliss. I played lots of kickball and even formed a little club of little girls. We created a name for ourselves using the first letter of each of our first names - very creative. We even had membership cards and, I believe, a newsletter.

Things were pretty good.

The next year, we moved from our cozy, poorly-performing elementary school to a much bigger junior high, full of older kids that had gone to other schools. Boys became very important, all of a sudden. This created a strangely competitive environment that made other things important, too, that hadn't been before. Clothes, alcohol, cursing, weekends at rollerskating rinks, you know, all of the things that make a 13 year-old feel cool.

As a somewhat pudgy middle child of a Christian family with 5 children, this created problems for me. I could not buy they clothes that everyone else had, and even if I could have, they wouldn't have looked the same on me. I wasn't allowed to date or go to the rollerskating rink. I didn't know how to talk that way or interact with boys that way.

And everyone knew it. I didn't get invited to parties. I didn't get asked on dates, or whatever the 13 year-old equivalent of a date is. Someone (now a dear friend of mine) on the bus asked me once, quite menacingly, if the book I had in my lap was a Bible. I think it was actually The Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Teen, which, in retrospect, should have been more embarrassing.

To make things worse, I had been put in a special group of "smart kid" classes and so I rarely saw most of the kids who were my friends at the other school and whose approval I desperately wanted.

I was miserable.

So miserable, in fact, that when the year ended I opted to go a boarding school, rather than return to that school for a second year. I couldn't handle the rejection and the inferiority any more. It was more like indifference, but we middle children are very sensitive to these things.

Funny thing about taking an average kid from a city public school and putting them in a fundamentalist Christian boarding school in rural New Hampshire - she turns into a cool kid.

In a world where all of the students sign a "no dancing," "no movies" contract, and where the entire 8th grade class is less than 10 people, it takes very little to impress, so impress is what I did. And, as that handful of more-sheltered-than-me kids began to love and respect me, I began to love and respect myself.

At Thanksgiving, my mom came and got me for good, mostly because the people at that school were a bit nutso - someone told me that if my older brother was accepted to Yale, he would certainly begin to worship Satan.

I returned to the public school with a confident and carefree spirit that changed everything. I didn't care any more if those same kids liked me, which, for some reason, made them like me. I had a lot of fun that year.



It's an unfortunate situation, really.

We all can't get shipped off to a nutso boarding school whenever we're struggling with low self-esteem. I just got lucky that one time.

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