Cross-Country Team Analysis

With the Cross-Country team, I feel like an insider. An experience that best exemplifies this feeling is from a practice during my freshman year. I was a slow runner, running in a pair of poor quality shoes and the fastest kid on the team came up to me and told me that I needed new shoes and that he would help me purchase them. As a scared freshman on my first runs, I needed something of this nature, a confidence booster. It showed me that the community surrounding me was not only caring, but also welcoming. However, as the season went on, I realized that random acts of kindness and friendship were not out of the ordinary, but the norm. I found myself running with people who could have run with a faster group, yet ran with me. Cross-country
At hebrew school, I feel like an outsider due to my complete and utter lack of relationships with people there. Having been to elementary school with the majority of the kids and having attended to hebrew school for a decade with them, one would assume I had bonded with the people there, but the truth is quite to the contrary. I had never been friends with most of the people at hebrew school, yet I had been able to strike up a conversation with many of them. Since I stopped going to school with them, I became unable to converse in the same manner. Conversation topics are limited when I don’t go to school with the people there. Additionally, the people there aren’t willing to invite me into their conversations in the way I can with the cross-country team. The commonalities that I have with people at school aren’t there. Oftentimes, I’m just a social outsider, but drifting around people, alone and friendless. At hebrew school I am able to handle myself in class, yet during dinner, I find myself on my phone, because there is nobody to talk to, an environment that is far from welcoming, a situation that causes me to feel as if I am foreign. People do not make an effort to include me and there are no kind, welcoming gestures. Hebrew school has a different feel, an unwelcome feeling, one diametrically different from the way I feel with my