What’s sad and lonely and vulnerable all over? New kids. That feeling of going through life with no friends is an instant depressor. Hating school because you know that although you walk up the same steps as everyone else, you don’t really belong there. Your uniform is new while theirs is old. When a teacher tells you to go the transportation office you immediately feel out of place because any other student would know exactly where it is, but you are new and have to learn your way around the school like you did for your last school, the one before that, and the one before that. Those Fridays where you try to leave school as soon as possible while watching everyone else try to find their friends, because they have had 12 years to learn to feel a sense of belonging in the school, where as the new kid all you want to do is get away as fast as possible, for you feel vulnerable and like an outsider. Scratch that. You don’t feel like an outsider, you are an outsider.

Being the new kid is something that you have to experience to really understand the pain of it. That constant long for someone to just walk up and start talking to you gets stronger and stronger until eventually you just give up and except that this is how it will be for the next years. As a new kid you sometimes feel like a chameleon. You think about the people who have a place to call home as animals with one color, they are either green or brown or blue or etc.; however as someone who is constantly the new kid you feel like a chameleon, constantly changing color. Sometimes you wonder what color you started off as and you can’t remember, which just makes you want to know more. Instead you are stuck changing color depending on where you move, for to make friends and fit in you have to adapt to your different environments. You desperately want to stop changing colors but you can’t control it, plus you’ve changed too many times now to really know which color fits you best.

All you want is to belong, you don’t need to be with the popular group but all you crave is to have a group of friends. You try and imagine which group of people you think you would fit in the best with only to remind yourself that people would find that creepy, and unlike you they have friends and aren’t in need of someone to help them feel less lonely. So you’re stuck feeling lost during those breaks, not knowing where to go and hoping you’ll run into at least one of the other new kids so that you can just stand in the back of the group and act like you belong somewhere. Or maybe you walk around feeling like an idiot pretending to be busy on your phone, so that at least you don’t look like a creeper just staring into space. Those awkward moments in class, where you are supposed to find a group but knowing that obviously no one wants the “new kid”, are terrible and on a bad day they make you just want to start crying cause you just can’t take it any longer, but from experience you hold back for a moment, try to find the group that needs one more person then slowly try to make your way over there hoping that they won’t deny you. The worst part isn’t even the fact that you have no one to talk to or get in trouble in class with for laughing too much, but the fact that you had that. You were that person who looked forward to the teacher letting you pick your own group because you knew where you were wanted and with just an eye glance and maybe a creepy look from one of your friends across the room you were part of a group. Trying to make yourself feel better you think, “This experience of knowing what it’s like to be the outsider will make you a better person in life,” but at this moment in time you don’t care what type of person you are, for all you want is to belong.

Parents, teachers, and family try to make it better and tell you how lucky you are to have social media, but little do they know how much harder that makes it. You look on Instagram every day only to be reminded by the smiling faces of your best friends, enjoying time together, of all the memories they are making that you are missing. Although while you saw them every day you guys were extremely close, you constantly fear that as time passes you will drift from each other. On snapchat you receive tons of pictures and videos of your friends enjoying school, while you send them back depressing, lonely pictures. Even seeing the faces of middle school friends all together in high school makes you jealous of how they got to stay together and how they get to look back at high school as a time filled with great memories and great friends. Meanwhile you are stuck in a reality where you have no one to enjoy those moments of class time where the teacher lets you have a break, you tip toe around a school feeling below everyone because its their territory and their home, not yours, and finally the bell rings letting you free only to go home to fill your mind with music and that amazing social media which so kindly reminds you of everything you are missing out on. You try to keep a smile on your face as to not bring pity to yourself, but in your room you break down. How you try to not let those tears past your eyes, but its too much. The emotions are too strong. Being the new kid is an experience that you will never forget, and you hope that it does not foreshadow what the rest of life will feel like.