[theonlyplace]

I could say that the worst part for me is that I didn't fit in, but that's not true. Overall, the most depressing part of my high school experience is not realizing until much later that it was okay to be different than everyone else. I didn't see that it was a good thing to not want to follow along with everyone else's idea of what an awesome high school experience was supposed to be. I wasn't a cheerleader. I wasn't popular. I wasn't beautiful. I didn't have good fashion sense in the least. I was so awkward and always like boys who were "out of my league". But I see now that it was a positive thing. I didn't have the courage to embrace who I was back then an instead kept fighting upstream, attempting make myself believe that I needed to be someone else in order to be happy.