Lilli Duncan ’20 has generally had difficulty throughout her life fitting in.

Imagine feeling like you were an outsider, like you do not belong or fit in with the “popular kids” or just other kids in general. This is what elementary school was like for Lilli Duncan ‘20, who never really had a lot of friends. “I used to think, y’know, it doesn’t really matter? Like everyone can be your friend in elementary school,” Duncan said. “But that just wasn’t really the case.  There’s more of a popularity scale than there is now.”

At first, you might be thinking, “So what? Who cares about elementary school when this is high school?” But for Duncan, her elementary school experience shaped her personality for her life after. “I had, like, two friends,” Duncan said. “and everyone else pretty much thought of me as annoying.” Her friend from elementary school, Ayanna Alvarez ‘20 who goes to Washington High School, said “Yeah, we were kinda weird. I got along with our classmates a little more than she did; she was pretty random at times, and she talked a lot, but I did too so we got along really well.”

Duncan went through a lot of bullying in elementary school, and she thought it was because of her tendency to blurt out and not really think about what she said—something she attributes to her ADHD. She carried this habit  into her first year of junior high. “Thinking about it now, I kinda see myself as someone who was complaining about things that didn’t really matter,” Duncan said. “Sure, I was bullied, but did I really need to write so much emo poetry?”

Duncan shared a piece of her old poetry from 6th grade:

The crack in the wall

The imperfection in life

The broken glass

The shattered sight

The way I see you

The way you see me

The way we just can’t clearly see

We see the bad, never the good

We push and pull at each others doors

Until we know we can’t feel anymore

Although I wish we had perfect vision

We failed to see the great ambition.

Lilli went on to junior high and for her it seemed to get a bit easier to make friends because people did not seem to care as much about popularity and were more interested in personalities.  “I was suddenly in a place where I actually had more than 5 friends, which was very new for me,” Duncan said.

Duncan’s anxiety and ADHD has often made it difficult for her to make friends, and after going to school with basically the same people for 6 – 7 years, she was now meeting so many different types of people and learning so many new things about other people. Her knowledge about other people and the world outside of school was pretty limited to what she had been told in elementary school. “I learned about so many different things, and found out more about the world around me, which is something that I’ll always carry as an important lesson: you can always learn more about something, no matter how much you think you know about it.”