Personal Narrative: Transitioning From Elementary School To Middle School

Everyone strives to be accepted and loved. Acceptance is wanted at any age. From my high school friends to my elders who work a nine to five job, some still crave to be accepted by their peers. The world we live in is full of expectations that people are suppose to live up to. These expectations can bully people into changing themselves. I too changed myself to be accepted by my peers. In end I learned a valuable lesson. Changing yourself for others, so they will accept you, only leaves yourself unhappy and miserable. It is better to stay true to yourself and be loved by your closest peers because those people are the only ones that truly matter in your life.
Transitioning from elementary school to middle school was very difficult for me. I
I continued to hide myself by keeping up the expectations for my peers. My once voluminous curly hair was now flat and damaged from being straightened every day. My clothes were now changed to button down collared shirts and skinny jeans because those were the new trends of the year. I disliked my clothes, but I told myself that this is what people expected of me. If I wanted to be accepted I had to swallow my pride and not complain. I slowly became very quiet at school. I stopped talking to my peers and I started sitting by myself at lunch. I became depressed. I wondered why people would not like me for me. I questioned why I was so unlikeable. My solution was that it was my fault. Once I believed this, I started to hate myself. I hated the way I talked. I hated the way I looked. I hated everything about myself. I was so hateful about myself, I stopped being my true self at home and started acting how I acted at school. The one person who noticed this change was my sister. One day, she came up to me and told me she heard me crying in my room. I tried to lie, but she quickly shut me down asking me what was wrong. That day was the day that I broke down and finally expressed all the feelings I had bottled up. I cried for hours explaining everything that I went through throughout those two years. She comforted me and told me, “If you aren’t true to yourself then who are you? Why are you pleasing people who have nothing to do with