Who knew the Earth doesn’t revolve around me?
By: Nat X.
Tags: Growing Up, Coming Of Age, Education, Public Schools, Private School

How transferring changed my life.

I grew up at a very small private school that ran from infant through eighth grade, where my graduating class was just 45 kids. There are plenty of weird stories and quirks I could tell about that experience but the most important things to know are that I was with the same 45 kids my ENTIRE life. No one really did sports out side of school or had other hobbies and interests, so we all just stuck to the pack. We had drama, cliques and scandals like no other school.

By the end of my time there, the environment at my middle school was a cesspool of drama and privileged white kids. Everyone was so close that you couldn’t do anything without everyone talking about it, everyone knew everything about each other. Due to the lack of privacy, there was no room to grow or to change into a new person. If you wanted to change your style, everyone would notice, everything was made into a thing that it didn’t need to be made into.

Furthermore, it was a private school, which meant that all the kids there were your asshole pre-teens whose main hobbies were bullying each other and exercising their privilege.

I live in a city where there are about 5 (out of probably 150–200 city wide) amazing high schools that every eighth grader in the city are trying to get into. You go through a series of tests that have similar stakes to taking the SAT or the ACT at the age of 13. Long story short, I didn’t do my best on the tests and I did not get into one of the top high schools, instead, I got into a mismanaged and under funded high school known among the teenagers as the school full of drug dealers.

My parents have always prioritized education over everything else, so we moved just outside of the city so I could go to a school with a student body of 3,200 students. It was an incredibly privileged decision but it was the decision made nonetheless.

So I had just come out of this crazy middle school experience, and when I switched I was blown away by the anonymity. There was drama, but you could go to class and only your close friends would know. The biggest thing was that if you didn’t like someone, you could just not talk to them!! All these small annoyances that I barely noticed were there dissipated. It made school exciting, and it made me want to learn and to participate.

Beyond the size of the school, the transition brought a lot of other changes, and as I mentioned before, my middle school was mostly rich white kids. I can explain this as they never had anything happen to them. Maybe a dog died here or there, or an older relative, but no one had ever had a family member killed, or dealt with suicide. I’m sure half the student body was depressed, but as far as like really serious issues, they were just non-existent, money solved it all. The student body was somewhat self-aware that we lived in a bubble, but there was a moment when I got to high school where it really clicked.

I was sitting in English class, we were learning about imagery, and my the prompt we had been given was “write about a time where you had to ‘grow up.’” So I got to work writing about the one moderately traumatic event that had happened to me thinking I was the only person anything bad ever happened to. Oh boy was I wrong. As soon as the sentence “my sister OD’d and I found her dead on the bathroom floor” came out of a classmates mouth, I realized how twisted and privileged my world had been. The point was only driven home by students talking about their experiences being racially profiled or sexually assaulted.

Just like that the bubble I had been living in for 14 years was popped, and my entire world view shifted. You look at people with opposing political opinions to you, and you wonder “how could they think that is correct? It’s so obviously wrong,” and then you realize that when you only listen to one news channel or only think one person is telling the truth and everyone else is lying, of course your perspective is going to be skewed out of control. Realizing I was not the only person in the world feels like it should’ve been obvious, but the glaring reality, is it really wasn’t to someone who had been exposed to the same white privilege poster children for their entire life.

The moral of the story is, don’t expose yourself to the same one type of person, that is no way to live; it will deprive you of all empathy, and turn you into the villain of every movie.