Always Been...Different

When I was a little first grader, I started to notice something. It was that I wrote with a different hand than everyone else in school. I used to sit and see who else wrote with their left hand too. I found one boy of thirty kids who was like me.

Then I started to learn piano when I was six. I loved to hear the music floating from the keys and my fingers. I wanted to learn piano because my best friend knew piano and so did some other kids I knew. So, for a little while, I was the same.

I got older. Music still held onto me tightly, I couldn't let it go. I went to second grade. I started to become different in another way, I used to play piano like everyone else, now I started to write my own songs. I made a CD when I turned eight in a little studio up the road from our house. I learned guitar as well.

Then I moved on to third grade. It got harder. My teacher who I had since first grade, seemed very unhappy. She got angry and upset easily and started to show her true colors. She would yell at me almost every day about something and I started to dread school. Every day I would cry before school and try to hide so I wouldn't have to go. Then when I was brought to my classroom, I would cry, so my teacher locked me in the bathroom for as long as four hours at a time because crying was disruptive to the class. My Mom and Dad didn't know this because I didn't tell them and neither did my teacher. I thought I deserved to be locked in the bathroom because I was throwing a temper tantrum. There was a certain boy who picked on me constantly. This teacher never dealt with it. The thing about this boy was that I think he really didn't know how to behave and didn't know how to get positive attention. Even though I was young, I had to learn that it's very important to forgive. I forgave a lot. He'd come to me and say he was sorry. I always said, "Thank you for your apology, I forgive you."

As I moved into fourth grade, things started to change. I got a new teacher, Julie. She really helped me. She was kind and very sensitive, like me. She took care of the problem with the boy who was mean to me and he started to stop being mean to me and stand up for me. I slowly started to come out of my shell.
Then one day while I was getting my lunch box, this boy stood up in front of the class and said "I'm really sorry for being so mean to you guys all of these years. And do you know what they did? They laughed at him. I came out and heard the laughter and a girl came up to me and told me what happened. "It was so funny!"
"That's not funny," I said. The teacher came and asked what happened.
"I apologized to everyone for being so mean," he said crying, "And everyone laughed at me, except Skylar." He pointed to me. I was surprised that he remembered that I was one of the few who didn't laugh. I guess because even though he was mean to me so many times, I forgave him and I'm really glad that taught him a lesson he'll remember. I saw him recently, he's polite, he remembers me and we get along like we were best friends always. That taught both him and me the power of forgiveness.

Come fifth grade, a new assistant came to teach language and grammar. New children became a part of our school. One girl I made friends with. We became very close and hung out all of the time. I became a part of a little three-way group. She invited me to her birthday, which was my first sleepover. I went to her house, she came to mine. We hung out almost every week. Then something strange happened. There was a girl with no friends, she got picked on. She wasn't small like me, she was big and tall. So, I invited her over. Well, I don't think my other friend liked that very much. She got very sarcastic and mean. She started to make fun of me and one day after recess, she came in with the seven other girls and sat around me in a circle. "We'll write on your face with Sharpy," because I hated the smell of the permanent marker. "We'll wrap you in newspaper and pour sour milk all over you." I was allergic to milk and didn't like the smell of newspaper. "We'll make you eat peanut butter." I didn't like peanut butter.

I had a small class and there were only eight girls in it. I didn't have many friends to choose from. The only person who hadn't made fun of me with the rest of them was a girl doing her homework in the corner. I knew what they were saying was supposed to be some sort of "joke", but it didn't feel funny.

I hated school so much, I quit and found a new teacher and started home schooling privately with her. I started to like learning again.

This year, I have a great home school teacher and also met a new friend. Her name is Juel. We both like photography. She's an amazing artist and is very serious about it, I'm serious about my music. We both like computers and are obsessed with Tom Hanks. We are both different too.

What I've had to learn is that everyone is different from each other but there is a "really different" bunch in the world. I'm probably one of them. And many people say, "You're weird" or they don't understand you because you're so different from them. But you know what? That's Ok.