At the time, most of my decisions feel right and like I’ve put enough thought into them so that I won’t regret what happens in result of my action. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but it ends up going badly quite a bit. I’ll say something that sounds friendly, but it turns out to have the opposite effect of what I want it to, or someone says something I wouldn’t have expected, such as being offended by something that I felt was just light humor.

Over time, this has led to paranoia about what effect my actions have, and most of the time I don’t say or do something that may have a good impact on someone. What makes it worse, is that the people I want to care and talk to about it don’t seem to show interest or have any opinion about my insecurities. It could be because I should make a first move and try to talk to them about it or that they might not be as close to me as I feel they are.

It has, over and over again, made me feel depressed and that nobody cares, even when I know there are many people who do. Even when writing about topics like this, I’m afraid that it’s corny, and I skip most of my ideas of what to write. Starting from the beginning, my insecurity mainly started from how I acted at my old school. Not knowing at the time is why I made the decisions I did, but it still has quite an impact on me now.

My most vivid memories are of when I started maturing and realized my actions and the decisions I made weren’t good. My crude and sometimes hurtful sense of humor needed changing or adjustment, which I realized after being told that it was rude. Around the end of eighth grade and the beginning of freshman year, I changed for the best, which defines the kind of person I am now.

I am now paranoid, worried about how others will react to my actions. Because of my negative actions so many years ago, I also worry about the impact they’ll have on my relationship with those people. I used to be told, not very gently, “You should think before acting and speaking!”
In my first few years back at my school, my peers were mean to me. I wondered, ‘Why is this happening?’ Before I had braces, someone who I thought was my friend called me a “beaver” because of my slight buckteeth and the gaps in my teeth. They didn’t say it meaning to be funny; they said it for the sole purpose to insult me. When my mom became pregnant with her third child, the same person had the nerve to tell me that my mom was a w****. She now has five, and nobody can really do anything about it. She loves having kids and loves sharing that fact, too. The insults hurt quite a bit, and I knew I couldn’t do anything about them because I was lower on the social scale than he was at the time. To this day, other people have begun to dislike him more and more as well, especially me, because he tends to be fairly arrogant and act like he knows more than he actually does. Maybe this is how I was acting.

I used to be told that I was “annoying” by others, which I now believe, because of my lack of control or thought over what I said and did. I have the same problem now, occasionally, and it gets me in a bit of trouble sometimes. From my viewpoint now it seems more like most people were trying to help me mature, if anything, but at the time some of what they said hurt as well.
I hadn’t been ready for the shift into social cliques, and it was weird coming back to a place where it felt I had been friends with everyone in kindergarten. However, we weren’t still in kindergarten, and we weren’t close anymore. It sucked feeling like an outsider.

After about a year and a half or so from seventh grade, I felt much more mature and more proud of my maturity level and felt glad that it was all changing for what feels like the best. I feel depressed less often. I’m happier more often, and I have many friends compared to back then. Even the insecurity tends to be worth it because everything else, such as my friends and life in general, is better than it had been.