Before I was even in high school, I had moved roughly a dozen times in my life.
When you are the new kid, you will receive a mix of the following receptions in my experience:
This kid was born spiteful. Maybe it's genetics, maybe it's circumstance. They don't reckon they are getting nearly enough attention, so why should anyone pay attention to you?
They will introduce themselves with some sort of statement like, "Nice shoes. Are those popular where you come from?" Perhaps they have an assistant twit to giggle at this.
Don't fret. You'll soon meet:
Now here's a class act— they see you struggling on your first day, and come to sit with you at lunch. Better yet, sometimes this kid invites you to a whole table of potential friends.
A new pal that likely grew up to be adventurous and lighthearted in all their endeavors, this kid will gas you the heck up! "You liked to do XYZ before you moved? That's so cool, I've always wanted to do that too!" The admirer is a gem, although sometimes they can be scared off by...
Sheesh, there is one everywhere you go, isn't there? Who knows what fuels these agro jerks, but one thing is for sure: A new kid shows up on the radar.
I guess when you are a walking dumpster fire of a human, you need a consistent pool of fresh people to torment. Maybe part of the reason bullies liked to shit test me was because I always liked...
This kid has some ailment that is really not a big deal at all, but they have been bullied into feeling it singles them out. Or perhaps they have 12 pet rats named after Harry Potter characters, and they can't stop info dumping about them.
This kid approaches you to see if someone nice has finally joined the school, and if you take the risk of alerting the bully to another dork, this kid will be your best friend. This is the one that will show up for you, the friend that you'll share adventures with.
The order you meet these people in can completely alter the equation, and I've experienced quite a few variations! In response to this week's prompt, I'm taking a walk down memory lane.
I didn't like moving, of course I didn't.
There is a case to be made that the way I approach people may have been molded by the fact that I knew better than to get too close to anyone pretty early on. Anyone I became good pals with was just someone to miss later.
Kids have short attention spans, and pre-internet it was snail mail or nothing. The way I handled this feeling of life-imposed loneliness varied from place to place.
In most places I lived as a child, I was able to find friends with similar interests pretty easily. Just like most kids my age at that time, I liked Pokémon, riding my bike, barbies, and utilizing my imagination under the clouds.
I basically never stayed for longer than a year at any school, and a few times I went to two in a year. It was nice to have so many experiences, to acclimate to different cities and vibes... but it also made me sad. I never had a shot at being part of a "friend group", I was ever the traveler.
When I was 10, I was the new kid for the last time, but I didn't know that.
Maybe it was the moodiness I had in having to move yet again, a sense of wariness as I attended the tour of yet another school... Or maybe it was the complicated home situation that had developed in my life, but I did not handle this time well.
Along with other factors, this made me a target for my peers. Did I mention how damn mean kids can be?
Within a month, a can of soda was dumped over my head, I was invited to a lunch table just to be humiliated, and I'd had to fist fight a middle schooler.
The lunch table incident was one that sent me running home to my dad to cry. His response was casual, some off-handed art of war type advice.
I had joined the school with only 2 months left in the year, so soon I had the summer to think over the experience. I would be going into middle school the next year, and although a lot of the awful people I met would be there, so would some new faces.
In a way we were all the "new kid" on the first day of middle school, but I was surely the one with the most experience at it. I went into that building with a battle plan, and by the end of the first semester I had my footing secured.
I'd never recieved such a terrible reception as I did moving to that city, but I wasn't going to let a rough start define me. It was the biggest city I'd lived in, and people were so very different. I learned their way. How to handle rudeness with pointed humor, to stick up for myself, and the graceful art of throwing my enemies off balance.
As I became a city girl, I knew one thing though. I was never going to be rough just because people around me were being rough. I would stay polite, I would kill people will kindness as a first line of defense. And if everything else failed, I wouldn't be afraid to defend myself. Balance, being the new kid taught me that it's what life's all about.
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