I have been asking myself this question a lot recently, to the point where I’ve really had to sit down and stop everything I am doing (which isn’t a lot due to quarantine!) in order to properly think about it.

How many times have you been in a room with other people and thought, “why did I just say that? They’re going to think I am really weird now!”. If you are human, that number will probably be really high. Constantly we feel this need to ‘fit in’ and to belong. At school, this relates to popularity and being accepted into a clique – that is definitely the case at my school, where there are the cliques and that is it; there is no one that doesn’t belong to one. In a way, this is kind of a good thing, because that means we always know who is like us, but, on the other hand, it limits our options of friends and immediately allows others to judge. For example, the ‘popular’ or ‘cool’ group, will always look down on the rest of the year group, it is who they are. People like that I do not get on with: people who think that they are above others and judge someone based on who they are or what they look like. What does it matter to you?

Why do we care about what others think? I have my life, you have yours. That should be it; we shouldn’t have to prove ourselves to anyone. We should be allowed to be ourselves and be alright on our own. Why isn’t this possible, I ask you? If it is really that easy to not care about how others view us/not to judge others, how come the world isn’t like that already?

These questions are also quite hard to answer. Personally, I think that our society is a place which can’t be changed easily, if that makes sense. Once the society has a certain way of thinking, that doesn’t change much. It is weird to address the society like a living person, but that’s what it has become in a way. We – I’m using the general term here, because we all do things as I have been describing – follow the society like lost sheep, claiming that we are just trying to ‘fit in’, but that isn’t right. We shouldn’t have to do that. Why is there a phrase ‘to fit in’? We are our own person and unique in every way, and so we utterly should not care what we think of each other.

I don’t know, really, why everyone can’t just put down their masks and shields and accept people for who they are and get on with your own life. After school, none of it matters anyway, so why do people at school have to be so brutally mean and destructing?