Middle School/High School Years (Part 2)

This is part of my Personal History series of blog posts.

I attended Conner Middle School. It (as well as my high school, Conner High School) was only a 10 minute drive or so from my house.

I don't really look at my middle school years with too much fondness, other than some of the friends I had, as probably most people feel the same way. Middle school is compiled of those awkward years of ages 11-14, where everyone tries to be "cool," make new friends, and sometimes dump old friends in the process. It is a time where the body is changing and struggling between being half-kid and half-adult. It was a time of a lot of self-consciousness for me, and looking back, I think it was for most of my peers as well.

My favorite subjects continued to be Math and a little bit of Science, but I didn't normally admit that anymore, since liking those subjects didn't seem "cool." I also found a love and curiosity for art. I was not really good at all, but I just found it interesting and nice to do something different than busywork. I was in band for a little while, and played percussion, mostly the marimba and chimes. The boys in the class always took over the drums and cymbals before us girls had the chance to try them out.

In 8th grade, I made it on the dance team. I originally wanted to try out for the cheerleading team, since I had a little experience when I was younger with gymnastics. I ended up not trying out for that team, though, because I felt the girls had much more experience than me. Also, because I was so petite for my age, my mom was afraid they would make me a "flyer" (the one they toss up in the air and who ends up on the top of the pyramids, mostly). We personally knew a girl who was a "flyer" and had been dropped during practice, nearly causing her to be paralyzed. That pretty much scared my mom enough, and then me, to not try out for cheerleading. So, the next closest thing was to try out for the dance team. That was a lot of fun for me, as I loved dancing. I still love dancing to this day, yet lately it's been hard to find the energy to bust a move. The only hard thing was I was not the best on the team, so I felt like the other girls didn't really want me there. They all had had professional dancing experience for most of their lives, while I was more of a "freestyler." In that sense of the word, I just had fun dancing to the radio and making up my own moves, haha.

My good friends in those years were mostly Jessica, Jade, Aary, Ashley, DeNae, and Melanie.

My closest friends to this day from these girls (in which the friendships lasted from Middle School years to the present) are Jade and Aary.

I think I met Jade in Mrs. Petersime's algebra class. I don't even remember how we became friends after that. I'm pretty sure we did some projects for that class together, though. Jade is such a sweet girl. She is very selfless. I've seen her on multiple occasions give up some of the things she wanted in order to make someone else happy, or someone else's life easier. She is a great listener. She has such a fun personality with a great sense of humor. She is someone I could be totally weird and silly with, and she would just laugh and be silly too. She stuck with me as one of my best friends both before and after having my car accident in high school. She had just had a car accident the week earlier, and so she really understood how I was feeling and what I was going through. Most of my other friends seem to not care how emotionally traumatic was for me to have experienced that, but Jade knew. She helped me feel so much better, stuck by my side, and defended me when my other "friends" were teasing me about getting into a car wreck, and totaling my car. We ended up taking a lot of math classes together especially, even in high school. She was awesome at math, too. I remember her spending days and sleepovers at my house, and vice versa. She was one of my buddies at dances, and we would dance crazy all night. She was still my friend when it was "cool" for most of our other friends to just hang out and drink, even when I was eventually not invited because I would always turn down their invite if I knew my other friends were going to be drinking. She is still friends with me, despite my flaws. I can always be myself around her. She was also so excited for me to attend BYU-Hawaii, because she knew how much I had dreamed of going, despite it meaning I was moving thousands of miles away. She was even one of my bridesmaids at my wedding. She is an extremely hard worker. She endured through extremely difficult courses, graduated from UK, and passed the exam in order to be her dream, a R.N.  We may not always keep in touch that often, but I still love her as my friend, and I'm so proud of what she has accomplished so far in her life.

Jade and I at a dance.

I became really good friends with Aary around 8th grade when she had an "end of the year" party/sleepover. We were in the same math class, and I remember passing a lot of funny notes in class a lot. We became really close, and even more so in my high school years. I spent many days and sleepovers at her place. I spent so much time there, I started to call her mom, "Mom." We were both boy crazy, like, to the extreme. She still had me beat by having many more boyfriends than I ever had, and we had lots of fun acting crazy and talking about boys most of the time. She was big into dancing pretty much the whole time in our school years that we were friends. She eventually made it into the top class at her studio, and had won several awards both personally and with her team. But, just because she was a dancer, don't think she was the type of person that acted dainty and soft, haha! We would have burping contests, dancing contests, and even wrestling contests. We were always competitive against each other, always in good fun, of mostly everything: boys, grades, you name it. She was also my buddy at dances that would break out her moves on the dance floor with me. Some of our friends even started calling us the "Uh-Oh Oreos," meaning we're white on the outside, but we are practically black on the inside, especially when it came to dancing. We didn't mean it in a racist way at all. From those I've met, I think most people would agree that most black people are naturally better dancers than the majority of white people. Aary and I could just feel the beat and know how to move to it. She is such a crack up. We would always be crazy and silly together, maybe even to the point that it freaked people out, but we didn't care. It was actually more fun if we got weird reactions from people because we knew how crazy we were acting. On the other side, Aary is also a great listener. She was there through some very hard break-ups. She helped my self-confidence grow tremendously by always making me feel valued as her friend. She is friends with my true self, and all the craziness that comes along with it. I don't have to act like someone else around her. She's an extremely hard worker. She graduated from EKU and even went on an internship in Costa Rica to study primates. Now she's working with many wild animals (and kids, haha) at an outdoor education center. She seems to really love her job right now. I love her as a friend, and I cherish our friendship. I might not always do the best to keep in touch with her, but I know our friendship will last over time because of the bond we had in school.

Aary and I on one of our last days as Seniors.