If I could label myself, the paper taped on my forehead would only have one word written on it:
Meaghan.

I walk into the hallways of a school filled with students who hold judgement in their every thought and walk around with an invisible, yet easily readable, label across their foreheads. I force a teeth grinding smile onto my pale face. I too walk around with a label across my face, but my label is different depending on who is walking past. High school is like a grocery store; people are labeled like the jars that sit on the shelves of the store.
   

In middle school I was in the spotlight all the time. I could write a page long list of the extra curricular activities I participated in, and another two pages of people I considered my closest friends. I was always invited to parties and I always went and had a wonderful time sitting by a roaring orange fire with people I thought would be my friends forever. I thought that being popular in middle school meant being popular in high school which I seemed to believe was the key to success, but it was definitely a subconscious idea about life. I never sat down and said to myself, “You need to be popular because it will get you far in life.” I just seemed to have that idea in the back of my head. However, I couldn’t have possibly been more wrong.
   

When I first walked into my high school, I was ecstatic and full of untamed energy. Unfortunately, the minute I saw my friends from middle school, I knew that nothing was going to be the way it was before. Leaving middle school, I was one of eighty in my class, entering high school I was one of two-hundred and something or other. I went from the top, to being part of the whirlwind of students trying to maintain their middle school balance, but I didn’t end up keeping mine.
   

I wouldn’t say that I fell to the bottom, I just started focusing on what I wanted to do. I still got invited to parties at first, all the way through the middle of sophomore year actually, but I turned down the invites almost every time because unlike a lot of my peers, I didn’t want to sit in a musty basement in a cloud of weed. I would just sit there, wishing I was home singing in the shower. I would rather skip the wishing part and go straight to the staying home and singing in the shower.

Eventually people realized that I wasn’t going to come to their pot fests, or raves and stopped inviting me. I became less popular and started to fade away. To be honest, I’m not complaining about losing my popularity because the people who are most well known also seem to be the most judged. But at the same time, maybe I am just not aware of how harshly I’m being judged; in life, there’s uncertainty in everything we do.

As much as I enjoy not being the center of attention all the time at school, I most definitely do not enjoy the environment itself. I hate how I can physically feel the tape being stuck to my face, holding on my label as I walk by people. Some of these people I’ve known for twelve years, some only for one and they’re all drastically different, but they all have one thing in common, they all have labels.

The labels themselves are what really get to me, I can’t wait to leave high school. I can’t wait to have a new beginning, in a new place with new people. I want to have a new label, one created by myself.