Sometimes, The Best Thing You Can Do is Try

Before I turned 18, I moved a total of 4 times. All 4 of these moves occurred before I turned 10 years old. We moved around often enough that, when my parents told me that the 4th and final move would be the last one we would make until my sisters and I graduated from high school, I did not believe them. This mistake of not trusting my parents’ word was one of many I would make during the second half of my childhood.

Before the final move, we lived in Pennsylvania for 3 years. I made friends at school and felt like I was at home in that town. I loved everything about the place. My parents had other ideas. My dad started a business and could run it from anywhere as long as we had an internet connection and he lived close enough to an airport so that he could travel to his clients. My mom’s parents and her brother lived in upstate New York. My parents decided that it would be best for our family if we lived closer to them so that my sisters and I would get to know our grandparents better. When I was 9, we made our final move to upstate New York.

When we first moved there, I wanted to make friends, but unfortunately, at my age, I was both shy and upset at my parents for uprooting me from my friends at the previous school. The combination of the two caused me to do the worst thing a new kid at school could do: shut people out. I would only speak if spoken to for the most part. I cried nearly every day of the first school year I lived there. I earned myself a reputation of being a crybaby. It was something that maybe people forgot about, but I never did. I spent the first 4 months of my 4th-grade year alone. I didn’t have a person I could consider a friend until 4 months into the year when someone finally gave me a chance. She would be my only friend that entire school year, though I did try to get to know some of her other friends.

Once I got past the first school year, going from 5th grade onward, I tried to be a nicer person, especially after spending an entire school year being bitter. By the time I got to middle school, I liked to think that I was nice to people for the most part. I wasn’t always perfect, but no one is. However, there was one thing I was never quite able to do: let people in. For the next 8 years, I would struggle to make friends and keep them. This was mostly my fault. For example, instead of taking lunch period to talk to people I was sitting with, I’d do homework instead so that I would have less to do when I got home. That may have given me more free time in the evening, but at what cost? The cost was that I didn’t talk to my peers during the one time of the day we were able to chat about something other than school. This got worse when I went to high school, where the school allowed us to go anywhere off school grounds for lunch. I ended up eating lunch alone in the hallways, doing homework if I had it, or reading a book on the rare occasions I didn’t.

It was also hard to let people in because I never knew how to relate to other people. Back during my middle school years, many girls my age were really into makeup and Justin Bieber. I tried to get into those things, but I was not a fan of either thing. I was able to carry a conversation about said things, but I had no idea how to strike up a conversation about topics I was interested in. I was, and still am, really into Nintendo games, Star Wars, and many other topics, but I couldn’t find places to relate to many of my peers on these topics. I was, and still am, what I’d call a nerd, but I was a nerd who could not find anyone else to talk to about things that I was interested in. The best I could do for a long time was read books other kids were reading, although this didn’t help either since many people my age were reading things like The Hunger Games and Divergent. I learned quickly that dystopian novels were not my cup of tea, but I read them so I at least could carry on a conversation about something.

I will give my younger self some credit for trying out other people’s interests. I’m going to implore you to be willing to do the same. Don’t be afraid to try something new. You never know what you’ll like unless you try it. You might find that someone else’s interests could also be yours. However, that does not mean you should force yourself to like something. If you try something and don’t like it, don’t beat your head against the wall trying to fall in love with it. It’s okay not to love everything the general public does, I promise. I want to encourage you to let people into your realm as well. Talk about the things that you love, even if they are different. You may expose someone else to a new interest they never would’ve had otherwise if you hadn’t said something. Our differences are what make us each unique. Let people into your realm, and you may find yourself with friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.