Challenge Day 18: Tell a story from your childhood. Dig deep and try to be descriptive about what you remember and how you felt.
I should have seen it coming - I should have known that I didn't quite fit into the world they were entering - but I didn't see it. I didn't have a clue and I was completely and utterly blindsided. My best friend Jessica sat me down and handed me a note - a "Dear John" letter of sorts - informing me that we had grown apart and this was the "hardest letter she'd ever had to write" that I was so important to her and that we would always be friends, but that we just weren't best friends anymore.
This happened some time in the spring of my seventh grade year - my friends were beginning to experiment with boys and cigarettes and dieting that may have bordered on eating disorders - and I was still just a goody-goody little Christian girl - petrified of doing anything "wrong" and getting into "trouble." I was completely and utterly devasted - I wasn't heading in the direction that they were - I wasn't "cool" enough to be a part of the group anymore and I didn't know how to do anything about it. I was DUMPED and it wasn't by a boy - it was by all my friends in the world. I went to this junior high for these friends - I followed them there even though my parents had another school in mind.
I continued to sit with the group at lunch over the next few days, because I knew no one else and they had said that we were all still friends - I just lost my "best friend" status - yet after only 2-3 days - I was sat down again and told that maybe it was time that I should look for some new friends and somewhere else to sit at lunch. Now, my junior high was not a mega school - it was a small, private Christian school with about 60-100 people per grade level. I'm not sure how many kids were in our class that year, but we graduated with about 80 - and these 8 girls included the 6 that I had spent 2nd through 6th grade with and of the rest of our class there were a few other groups of girls that were all established and had been bonding for the last 6-8 months of the school year. Additionally, the girls that I had previously been friends with were the "cool" girls - otherwise known as the "mean girls"
- that was another reason I had been "kicked out" because I wasn't really capable of participating in the mean, but I still was linked to them in everyone's minds - even if I wasn't directly mean to them - I was a "mean girl" by association.
So, instead of being welcomed into a new group - I was a social leper - with the other girls not sure what to make of me. I sat alone in the quad and ate my lunch trying not to cry for weeks. A few times I sat with various groups of girls, but I was never really welcomed in, so I read books, and I ate, and I sat alone - for most of the rest of the year. I was so ashamed and felt as though I didn't deserve friends and that no one would like me anyway. The people who knew me for years and years didn't want anything to do with me, so why would anyone new. I didn't tell my mom for a while, but she figured it out.
I look back, and think about the things that they were doing and it makes sense that they didn't want to be friends with me, and it makes sense that I didn't fit in the group any more - but it didn't change the feelings of abandonment and rejection. It doesn't change the fact that I still struggle to be genuine and let people get to know me on a close intimate level. It doesn't change the years that I spent doing and being who and what anyone and everyone wanted me to do and be - just so that they would like me. I made friends with a group of much nicer girls the next year - who I continued to be friends with through high school - but who I seldom speak to now. I went on to spend a lot of time and energy "making relationships work" - I dated people who I should never have dated, because they liked me and I liked being liked. I needed to be cared about and wanted - and I compromised a lot of who I was for that.
Thankfully, the Lord pulled me out of the cycle and provided me with the most amazing man to marry - who loves me fully and completely - even the ugly and the hurt. The Lord gave me a family who whether we agree or disagree or fight or whatever else - we love each other fiercely
and will always protect and support one another. And now in this new town - where I had no family and I had a husband who fully loved and supported me and had helped me gain a significant amount of strength and confidence in myself, but who had to work A LOT - in this new town, the Lord is teaching me about trusting other women. He is teaching me about having friends - it is still a struggle, and there is still a piece of that twelve year old girl inside of me wondering why she did wrong and why no one likes her. But, that voice telling me that no one likes me and no one ever will is getting quieter - and God's voice is getting louder - the voice that tells me that I was fearfully and wonderfully made and that I am exactly who He created me to be. I can't make everyone like me - I can't make everyone want to be my friend - but I can be the me that God wants me to be - I can be fully and completely myself - no apologies - and I can trust that the Lord will provide me with the right friends, rather than just any friends. I can trust that He will provide me with friends who will love and support me and who will like me just as I am, while inspiring me to grow. And those friends - are way better than the friends who you have to constantly work to impress and who you have to constantly question and assess and keep trying to change who you are to keep around.
