On my first day of 6th grade I guess you could say I was.. Petrified. I think that was one of the first moments where my anxiety really kicked in, I remember feeling so small compared to everyone else in the school. I could see hundreds of kids rushing around trying to find their first class on time. I remember looking down at my little sheet of paper with each of my classes on it, and totally blanking on where each class was, even though I had literally been in each class not 2 weeks prior.  I still have nightmares about stuff like that, but anyways, I remember standing in the main hallway feeling completely lost, so I did my first smart thing of the day, and asked a teacher where my class was. She literally turned around and pointed at the door directly behind me. That is not a joke. The classroom was right behind me the whole time. Feeling pretty stupid I peeked inside the classroom just to see if she was right or not, because clearly the 11 year old girl who has been to this school all of three times knows better than a teacher who works at the school. So i looked inside the classroom and low and behold, I saw exactly zero faces I knew, which obviously was terrifying for me because of course the first thing that came to mind was “Omg this is a 7th grade class, they put me in a 7th grade class” queue the internal freakout session. I think the reason I thought it was a 7th grade class was because all of the kids in the class were super tall, like way taller than me, which i guess isnt saying much considering I havent grown in height since 6th grade. An additional horror in the situation was that I recognized no one from my school, which statistically shouldnt happen because there was only three 5th grade years going into Merril at that time, so I mean a 1 in 3 chance right? No. I knew no one. So here I am standing outside the classroom next to a locker when I hear the 2 minute warning bell, which makes my internal warning bells freak out even more than they were. In that moment as I feel like i'm about to cry I see a girl from my school! Better yet I see her walk into the classroom!!! I'm not alone! It's not a 7th grade class! Relief floods through me as I finally after like 4 minutes of just standing at the door, walk in. But then comes another set of problems, where do I sit? In this specific class we didnt have assigned seats on the first day of school, which was pretty brutal seeing as I knew a single person in the class, but even then she and I were not friends, so it would be awkward for me to go and sit next to her intentionally. The way the desks were set up was there were about 5 rows of 4 going across facing the front of the room, and there was one larger desk in the back of the room that seated two people. So I decided to sit at the bigger desk that seats two people, in hopes that someone would maybe sit next to me so I wouldnt be alone at the huge desk. Fortunately someone did! She was pretty tall and didnt seem to intimidating to me so I relaxed a bit as she sat down. My relaxation was short lived. As she sat down someone else walked into the classroom, clearly someone she knew and was friends with because the first thing she did was get up and go sit by them. I wanted to disappear. So there I was sitting at a dinky old desk that quite literally should have fallen apart by then in a room that smelled like expired hand wipes. Alone. As I sat there twiddling my thumbs, I thought about how dumb the concept of middle school was, why couldnt it be the same as elementary? My 5th grade teacher taught me every subject why couldny my 6th grade teacher do the same? Why did I have to switch classes every 45 minutes? Why was my English course broken into two classes between lunch? Why was the building so old? Why did every single room smell so weird? Why werent any of my friends in my class? I think the questions helped me calm down a bit, like the judging of the ways of middle school made be relax and think “okay so like everyone is probably just as freaked out as I am” with that reassuring thought I sank down in my chair a bit and relaxed more. I am going to do this, i'm going to kick middle school in the butt and i'm going to have a great time, I thought to myself. Which was a little optimistic if you ask me seeing as I had multiple embarrassing moments throughout the year after that, but you know I made friends, learned how to deal with switching classes every hour, and started to find a rhythm to my school days. So that is the story of my first day of middle school, quite the whirlwind in the moment, but looking back, it actually wasnt as bad as I made it out to be.