Notes

This Believe Essay
There are few memories I can recount vividly from my middle school years. I wasn’t popular in any sense of the word, but I didn’t take myself too seriously and I had friends that I was deeply close to. I was happy, but average, and those factors didn’t leave a lot of room for unforgettable, life-changing experiences. However, there is a set of experiences engraved into my brain that pertain to a long, but small conflict, that I cannot forget.. To me, the offenses and conflicts were microscopically tiny, but I can’t deny that the affair taught me valuable lessons, even if they were only realized years later. The whole thing taught me that humans naturally gravitate to cater to their own self-interest and emotions, that empathy involves taking the time and energy to understand another person, and that through empathy, one can easily fix violent conflicts.
When I was younger, I was very socially immature in comparison with my peers. I was overly loud when I was excited, abrasive, and had no intuitive understanding of other people’s emotions without formally analyzing all the factors to a situation and applying logic to something. This, however, didn’t hinder me in my extroverted ways, so I didn’t bat an eyelash whenever I tried to make new friends in my 7th and 8th grade gym class. I met 2 seperate, opposite girls, who often clashed whenever put together in any sort of group activity, which was all the time. One of them was named G, and what I remember of her is her attitude and condescension. She seemed like the type of person to carelessly deflect any sense of personal responsibility with a thoughtless eye roll. The other girl, K, was the complete opposite. While G seemed to care about nothing, K cared about everything. She seemed nice enough, when calm, but she wore her heart on her sleeve. Whenever she perceived an injustice toward her, she got fiercely vindictive and sullen to everyone, even her friends, and it didn’t help that she perceived every action to be a slight against her. All of these negative traits were brought to the forefront whenever they were assigned together in the same gym class for 2 years straight. G was a casual bully, and didn’t hide condescension even if her life depended on it, so K was often the victim of mocking looks, jokes among K’s friend group, and blatant annoyance. You know, the normal, cruel things that almost-teens with no self-awareness tend to do. K noticed, and overreacted, sending her emotions in a direction to everybody BUT the people who deserved it. Games that put her and G on opposing sides tended to devolve into accusations of cheating, petty complaints, and a dark frustration that only seemed to build with K, while G seemed plainly annoyed. It was the most tedious thing I have ever experienced in my entire career as a 13 year old. Every time this happened, my brain crashed several times before I even tried to understand it. Why was K always so angry, G was clearly being an idiot.