Hand up.

We created a clique of outsiders. We weren't going to fit into a John Hughes film category (Breakfast Club. Awesomest film of its day, IMO).... We weren't all jocks or all nerds or all freaks or all popular princesses or thugs or potheads or so on.... We had a little of this and that and whoever didn't fit anywhere else... People who Could Have Fit with a clique but felt themselves outsiders came to our table. We were the Outsiders, the Misfit Toys, take your pick.

Yet.... by being an outsider, boy, di dI get a good look at social dynamics in the other groups. And it was not pretty.

At my five-year-reunion (the only one I attended), a kid who'd gotten Spnaish help from me for two years pretended not to know me. Really? Okay, got it.

Some of us Outsiders drifted out of orbit and found other cliques with age. Others simply.... vanished. (God rest their souls, living or dead, since we don't know which it is.)
But the core of us? Still strong. 30 years of friendship and no end in sight. We "get it". How you can seem normal but it's only skin-deep, and changing what lies under the skin is too high a cost for the "privilege" of belonging to a group of people who want you to fit into a box that isn't quite your size or shape.

Sorry to ramble.

I guess I was sort of one of the lucky ones.
My mom didnt allow me friends at school. ( she was worse than mommie dearest in the movie ) But I did have one friend at high school. Sort of.
As Leo was noticing about HS friends or people, I noticed the same thing.....wow. The kids I went to school with really wound up with sucky lives. Whats worse is the never even left that hole of a town!
I cant imagine living my whole life there. UGH!
But I am glad I got to live other places and didnt have their lives. I hear a out the " school reunions" ( which I never went to ) and im glad I didnt go to them.
All in all, I felt much better knowing in what I know.
Friends may come and go in life. But living your own life and doing what you like to do is better. Or at least hobbies you like. :)

I forgot to say I was a outsider...and I am glad in many ways that I was.
Kids had clicks then and I didnt fit in them. Some were snotty and just plain rude. I wasn't. I was the softie that stuck up for the picked ons, including teachers. :)
L.

I was a lot more than outsider, I was invisible. My social skills were so lacking due to the abuse that I hated every day of school. It wasn't so much the other kids. I was the one who segregated myself from them. I think they gave me a hard time because they wanted me to join them. So I don't blame them, I blame me. I needed 20 credits to graduate, so 2 summers I took 1 class each to get to the 20 credit minimum so I could graduate at the end of my 11th year. No Graduating on stage, no prom, no nothing, just a diploma. And so it goes.

Bear in mind for me my older sister's reputation preceded me. She was (not a nice word) and so people saw me and thought, "Oh her older sister made my older sibling's life hell".

So my first week of high school, I'm in a class and two girls come over and threaten to beat me up and call my sister a beyotch and worse, and how she effed up This Guy (the older brother of one of the girls) and what was I gonna do about it!

I remember being petrified, 14, about to be beat up by 16-year-olds for something my sister did...

I blurted, "I know she's a b*tch, I live with her!" and my statement literally made them step back.... and ignore me for the rest of their time there. *whew*

Yeah. We were an odd bunch... My sis did awful things. Part of that was why I ended up an Outsider. But the view was.... Well, I was less entangled in the dramas and petty crap, and got good grades nad got out, and that was the only goal I had. Get Out. I did.

Woot!

That had to be nuts, Leo, to follow in your sister's footsteps and have her baggage dumped on you. Sounds like you blurted out the best thing anybody in your place could have said, though. Good for you.

I liked your mention of the movie The Breakfast Club--good one. It set me to thinking. When I was in high school here in Uruguay, the dictator's kids went to my school. Literally, the president's kids were driven to the school gates every day by Uruguay's Secret Service. It's a tiny country, Uruguay, but that still was big stuff. So the Beautiful People lived in orbit around the president's kids at school, and got their picture in the paper like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

Meanwhile, I now realize I hung out with orphaned kids. My parents were living, but they were neglectful at best and often abusive at worst. The kind of kids I hung out with, then, reflect the abandonment I felt at home. The thing is, like you said, Leo, we got good grades and took care of each other. I'm still in touch with one of those guys even though he moved to New Zealand, of all places.

These guys only get halfway interested in me because I came to Uruguay on a visit from the USA, and they associate the USA with glamour. They fly 8,000 miles a couple of times a year to Miami just to go shopping.

The irony of being blown off by somebody using a "cold" as an excuse is that I got a cold today! No fair! I forgot that coming to the Southern Hemisphere's winter from summer in the USA can do that to you. I've got a nasty bronchial infection started, and had to stay in my hotel room tonight from going to hear Dr. Jorge Bucay, the bestselling therapist author, speak here in town. Bummer.

i went to Over eight different high schools so i never fit in anywhere either. the school i graduated from from didn't even put me in the year book and no one knew i was even there even though i was the best female basket ball player in my school and i got many offers for scholorships because of my basket ball playing skills.
I played sports in every hogh school I went to and everytime I moved I would play against others that were at my previous school and they would all be pissed at me and call me a traderr. I just wanted to play sports and i couldn't help that i had to move. I was not popular at all.

I don't remember High School. I think I was dissociated throughout. It makes me sad and also kind of freaked out to be with people from my school and have no idea what they're talking about. I had no college days either - went to work and attended night school.

Hey, dragon, thanks for mentioning the number of schools you went to. I have reason to believe my dad had PTSD from his childhood home that went untreated so long it mutated into permanent forms of a greater mental illness. Fight or flight responses were the family rule, extreme ones across the USA, then across Mexico, then across South America.

As a result, I went to 13 schools in 12 years of schooling, moving from English to Spanish to English to Spanish and back again. The high school here is the only one I left and then returned to again 2 years later.

I think I'm a community college instructor because the inside of a school was the only constant in my life growing up. The outside would be a different state or even a different country every year, but inside, if I could switch from English to Spanish or back again, there was something I could count on to be constant.

high school, or school in general was very hard for me. I was bullied at school and when i held my head down they called me stuck up. for sure an outsider. i have not been to one class reunion and i only have one friend on my FB from school related stuff.

this, even though i was on the soccer team. my bully followed me everywhere.

sorry he blew you off Muji, it only shows his character in true color. not yours.

i know the feeling of being very different and sized up for being gay but the outsider one rings true wow ,, thanks for sharing

I was an insider on the outside.... but an outsider on the inside.. hope that makes sense.... very popular but known as a bit of a freak and tough nut..... teachers wanted me to go to a school for children with emotional problems..... surely they must have been aware of at least the domestic abuse at home... and the gossip about my promiscuity at 13 was never addressed by them either.... I went through friends like no tomorrow..... the last 3 years I wasn't allowed into classes and was placed outside the head's office with work to do... which I never did... why they just didn't kick me out permanently I don't know... well it was one teacher who told me I was too intelligent and he wanted to somehow save me at some point.. poor guy..... so I left school with very little knowledge and no qualifications

I was such an angry kid..... bcs of the lack of control and power at home and outside with the abuse I took it out at school..... but with my clever head... challenging teachers..... challenging the unfair rules.... and stupid things like refusing to learn French..... and then when I would do that and the teacher would tell me to stand on my chair for the rest of the lesson - him finding pleasure in humiliating me - I would tell him to go fuck himself... that would be me out of school for a week..... I believed I had a right to determine if I wanted to learn French or not... it should not be imposed on me...... ofc now I wish I had learnt it.... but I still have many issues with how the school system works

thankfully I went to uni when I was 26 and graduated with honours and followed that with post grad..... and funnily enough as part of my training I went back to my old school on clinical placement and some of my old teachers were still there.. could have blown them down with a feather.. funny how things work out

That had to be something, to go back to your own old school to be trained to be a teacher around your old teachers after all of that. That's like a movie or something. Way to go!

I liked what you said about being an insider on the outside and an outsider on the inside. That paradox would speak for me, too. I was the lead in school plays and was actually student body vice president, but as a poor kid at a rich kids' school, I knew that only went so far. So I hung out with the other poor kids and the orphaned kids.