Friends with The Quiet Kid – Creative Writing Essay
How was it that started our fateful friendship? As I remembered, it was the beginning of middle school when I was eager to meet new people yet, at the same time, was afraid to approach anyone. Even as a little girl, I was never a sociable person. Being born into an Asian family, it was idealistic to be a talented while
also being an outgoing kid because it was the way for others to even acknowledge a person’s existence. Nobody wanted to be friends with the quiet kid; that was what I learned from elementary school first grade in Taiwan. In addition, the one who wore the nicest clothes was the one whom everyone should exclude in their “list” of friends because of their simple jealousy. The quiet kid was depicted as the “weirdo,” which serves as the perfect target for the big bullies of the class. And I was the obvious example. However, despite all this, there was one girl that overlooked the outside appearances of mine and chooses to be friend with me. One day, I gained the courage to finally stand up to the bullies. As a result, I have befriended them and they even offered to be my body guards. Considering that I was only in first grade, the offering of body guards was like an honor to me. However, now looking back, I see how silly we all were. Nonetheless, the girl who stood by me later became my best friend. Although I have gone through the loneliness of my childhood and learned the value of friendship, one thing for certain that I have not lost is the reserved characteristic of mine. And it is two years later that I learned that I must leave Taiwan to go to school in America. Even then, the same feeling of being unwanted came back to haunt me.
To my surprise, when I continued elementary school in a small city of California I found that people were very generous and wanted to get to know me. The matter of difference of each individual was not as important as I thought it would have been like. And forever gone was my worry about being different.
Going on to middle school, as I said, was full of excitement as I was eager to meet new people with hopes in becoming more outgoing. However, my shyness continued to overtake my intentions. At the same time, the use of AIM was also gradually becoming popular among the students. Even I, who found opportunity to meet new people in its use, downloaded the program. In the beginning I did not acknowledge the detrimental effect of the use of AIM in building friendships. I was only concerned about getting new screen names, “chatting” by means of entering words through the lifeless keyboard, and then greeting them the next day with an awkward “hi”. Soon enough, online chatting was the way for many, not just me, to keep in touch with one another. The expressionless messages and the counterfeited smiley faces was the way we communicated our thoughts and expressed our emotions. As I have observed, this builds a shaky foundation for many friendships and many friendships are now judged as ephemeral. Friendships should not have begun in this manner, not through the deceiving messages sent from computer to computer. Expectedly, I now face the same consequences result from years of online communications. I realized what’s left in a friendship built upon internet usage is only emptiness.
The same genuine friendship from my childhood cannot be attained by shortcuts. Each friendship has its own story and all cannot begin with AIM or other similar source. These sources mask over our true self as well as prevent us from being unique. This experience taught me never to let anything hold back from the desire to change myself or to take shortcuts in life.