Picture It, Indiana

So I’ve never had friends. The hardest thing in the world for me was to make a new friend. I was different. My grandmother encouraged my differences, my mother encouraged them up to a point. I stood out from the class. I stood out in any crowd. My head never hung high with pride. I walked through my childhood with my head so low my chin nearly dragged behind me. Second grade should be the easiest grade for any kid between the ages of seven and eight, but for me it was just as lonely as any grade I’d ever been to prior.

I went to a predominately white catholic school in a small city. I was the darkest kid in my class. Believe it or not, I didn’t know I was black until Kindergarten. No one would sit with me. I talked to myself and my imagination was vivid. Imaginary friends were real for me. I ate my lunches everyday with my school’s principal. She saw me struggling with the other kids and wanted to help me in whatever way she felt would work. We were not the best dressed or the best looking kids. We ate weird food. I could speak two languages and my grandmother believed in catholicism devoutly and always made me read. I considered her my only friend...until I was assigned to Mrs. Yearling’s class.

It was 1996. My class was a mix of first graders and second graders. I sat behind a little girl, whose name I’ve since long forgotten. Her hair was long. She had the longest brown hair that I had seen on anything that wasn’t a store bought doll. Her eyes were brown. She was a very pretty girl. She also happened to be very popular in the class.

I remember her announcing her birthday party and handing out invitations to everyone in the class...everyone except me. The feelings I remember having were confusion, anger, sadness, and a hint of unworthiness. When I asked Mrs. Yearling about my missing invitation she told me that she would talk to my classmates parents, maybe they had made a mistake. They hadn’t. I wasn’t invited. I came from a poor single mother who had me as a teenager. I spent ninety percent of my time with my grandmother who worked for the state we resided in. I spent most of my first 7 years with her and when not with her in two different daycare centers with my little brother and my little sister. I was a weird kid. I didn’t talk much. My clothes were plain. My hair was always in more than ten ponytails. My gums were dark. I was a little chocolate pool versus a chocolate drop.

I didn’t get to go to the skating party. In the catholic community my mother was heavily judged and not even for the color of her skin, but her three kids by the age of twenty-five by three different men that had no place in our lives. My mother worked at the mall and sometimes she didn’t work at all. We were on welfare, we didn’t know what vacations were, and carribean mothers were standoffish and to themselves...my mother exactly. At a young age with three kids she didn’t trust anybody, but didn’t have the tools herself to make different choices even for us. She raised us the only way she knew how.

Well, I approached the most popular girl in the class and asked to go to her party. She laughed at me. She told me her parents said no and that I couldn’t come. I cried when I got home. I put on my best easter dress. I washed my face clean. I borrowed my mother’s lipstick. I put a large brown towel over my hair and tucked it behind my ears to keep its place. I put a headband on it to hold it there. I stood in my bathroom mirror with this towel on my head and this lipstick on my clean face wearing my Sunday’s best pretending I was pretty and popular and I looked like her.

Second grade was so rough for me. I didn’t know how to be proud of who I was, my background, my young single parent in a community that followed strict beliefs. I would love to say that it had a happier ending, but it didn’t. I grew up confused, outcasted, and struggling to find my own worth and my self esteem. I would make a friend here or there, life would happen and my new friend for the time would be in a different class making new friends, or would move away. We switched schools multiple times. I never got the hang of small talk or charismatic speaking. I spoke when spoken too, I wrote stories for my teachers, I read books all the time, I stayed to myself. Each school I was the ‘weird’ kid, but really I didn’t know my own worth. That light didn’t shine on me because it wasn’t my candle burning.

I got used to people walking away. I got used to never fitting in. By the time I got to high school I had completely stopped trying to make friends and socialize. I ate lunch in the school library or maybe my favorite teacher's classroom. I had to encourage myself to try out for different after school activities and felt so out of place on a team that I would quit halfway through or before I even really gave it a chance.

Adult me knows that it’s okay to not belong to a group, to have a different background from the majority of your peers, and to not be a good speaker, but it’s never okay to allow anyone else’s view of you to diminish yours. I used to be embarrassed that most of my ‘friends’ were teachers. If I knew then what I know now those teachers would still be friends today.