The In Crowd

All through grade school I believed in the social hierarchy. I believed that it was more prestigious to hang out with some groups of kids rather than others, or that there was something intrinsically better about being in certain company. To hang out with the cool kids, then, was success, and not to do so was to fail—not only fail, but also have to hang out with them.

So of course I worked as hard as I could for "success," and in so doing I treated other kids based on which group they belonged to. If they were part of the "upper" group, then I tried my hardest to be congenial and friendly and impressive; but if they were part of the "riffraff," the kids with faces covered in pimples who sat in the corner discussing anime, then I made sure to end the conversation quickly, lest a cool kid catch me and implicate me by association.

But I never made it into the in crowd. I spent most of my school days alone, confused, not realizing that in pursuing the people who "should" have been my friends, I ended up alienating the people who would have been my friends.