Lindsey Shaw Quotes

Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life's little horrors begin.

I was made fun of a lot in middle school. When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy to ask me out.

I remember the general anxiety of teenager, and I remember establishing some sort of appearance based on what my peers would think. And cliques, oh my God, the worst. The worst!

You never grow out of high school sadly.

As I got into middle school, I was really an outcast. But everybody was an outcast in middle school. I don't know who got the idea to put all kids going through puberty together in a school and give them academic elitism and competition and pit them against each other.

High school wasn't so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.

I was very average in the social label scale going through school. I was neither the coolest person in school, nor did I suffer the slings and arrows of being made fun of to such a degree that I couldn't get through the day.

Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

From middle school to the first year of high school, I went to a school in Miami that seemed like a private country club. The whole cheerleader, football player, clique-y thing there was terrifying. Those people were so scary. They're the scariest kinds of people because they are idolized by their peers.

As a teenager, I had big breasts for my age, and my friends cracked on me a lot.

Oakland Technical High School. Like any high-school experience, it was ambiguous. I was shy with girls; I had friends, but there were times I didn't feel I had the right friends. My grades were only so-so.

As a teenage girl myself, I've gone through times in my life where I've felt insecure about who I am and have tried so hard to fit in with everyone else.

Coming into high school, it's scary. You don't know which group to be in, and I can't stand that it's so cliquey.

In high school, there are so many cliques. You're never safe.

It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.

Puberty was not kind to me. I had acne, eczema and had a stye in my eye, so it was quite hard to go in to somewhere where the majority were boys. At that age, they were quite vocal about what they thought of your looks.

Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers?

High school was interesting. For the most part, I quite enjoyed it. But everyone is trying to find their footing, and school can be a tough environment. Kids can be cruel to each other. It's quite unforgiving at times.

At a young age, I was very aware I was different and not perceived in a good way. For a lot of my adolescence, I struggled with that, trying to identify where I belong and who my real friends are.

I discovered that I was 'different' in the third grade. As the new kid at school, I was trying hard to find my footing. I thought I had made friends with a couple of girls - until they stopped talking to me. When I confronted them, they said their mothers had warned them to stay away because they might catch my skin condition.

There's something incredibly vulnerable about middle school for me. We're really impressionable during that period. The cement's still wet, so to speak, and a lot of things later in life are born during that season.

I remember in middle school and high school being so concerned with what everybody else thought. I was trying to be someone I wasn't. I wish I could've just let it slide and not cared about it.

I was never the cool kid in school, and loads of people told me that I was weird, that I dressed uncool and did uncool things, that I was too nice, too happy.

I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.

So there I was, with the two hottest girls on campus, having lunch. I was "the man", the envy of every other guy in our school. Buddy, I was miserable." -Bryce Loski