“Can you stop talking? Please?” my friend yelled at me from across the lunch table one day sophomore year.
She hates me now, I thought. I shut my mouth and faked a smile as tears welled up in my eyes.
I was confused. She had asked me how I felt about my math class, and all I did was tell her. Well, kind of. I did it in an extremelylong-winded and critical way, likely giving her second thoughts about taking the class.
I’ve always been verbally obsessive about school. Whenever I was upset about a school activity, I often wasted hours at a time launching into irrational discussions about it with friends. Or,like the incident at the lunch table, Icomplained so frequently about certain classes that sometimes people would beg me to stop.
Talking about school was easy. What wasn’t easy was dealing with not having a friend group after freshman year. Nearly every school dance since then, I’ve gotten left out of or plain rejected by at least one group.
I spent sophomore and most of junior year at home wallowing, convincing myself people hated me because they didn’t invite me anywhere. Since then, I’ve realized I whined about school so much because I had so little going on.
I thought I was being relatable, sharing complaint after complaint about school thing after school thing, but it was all my peers ever heard from me, which I can imagine got annoying very quickly. Being so negative all the time was pushing people away even more and making me feel worse. And,in reality, I was doing nothing to try to better my situation.Waiting for people I never spent time with outside of school to magically invite me to join their plans was never going to get me anywhere.
So I took initiative, and immediately, my life began improving. I forced myself to reach out and make plans instead of waiting for someone to reach out to me. I got a job and quickly met more people. Most importantly, I started looking for commonalities with others instead of laser-focusing on academics because that was easiest to talk about. Soon enough, I was barely spending any time at home.
I no longer feel like academics are the only thing I have going for me, and in hindsight, that was never really true in the first place.I wasted so much time being sad about not having a group of friends that it’s taken until now to see how much I have to be proud of. I’m so much happier with myself, and all it took was a little bit of reaching out to people and a little bit of filtering out my complaints.
Maybe being left out still stings a little extra for me, but when it happens, I now know I’m in control of my own actions and there’s always a way to turn things around. If there’s one thing I wish I could tell sophomore me at the lunch table, it’s that everything will be fine.