People can learn a lot from crayons.

After all, they’re all different colors, but they all manage to inhabit the same box. They’re different, but they live together.

No doubt you remember elementary school. Most remember the playground, their friends, tetherball and hopstotch. There may be a few that dread looking back to those days because they were bullied, ridiculed, or excluded—let’s face it: kids are terrible to each other. Amongst all the innocence, there is cruelty. There are the bullies that would steal your lunch money, beat you up, call you names, and make you feel inferior. Perhaps worst of all, there were the “elite” groups who would let no one else in.

It’s hard to think now that I used to be part of an elitist group.

At 8 years old, I reached the apex of my being. I had friends, stuffed animals, my very own club, and most importantly, I had power.
Perhaps I should explain. I changed schools in 3rd grade to a school with only around 100 students. It wasn’t especially sad for me, because I didn’t have many close friends at my old school. During my first year at there, I acquired a friend thanks to the child-hood game we called “Hot Lava Monster”. Basically, a bunch of kids would play on the playground and avoid touching the tanbark-covered ground. The “Lava Monster” would try to lure an unsuspecting kid into the tanbark so that kid would be the new “Lava Monster”.

I gained a friend through that silly game. We distanced ourselves from the playground and its lava monsters as we grew tired of the game—or perhaps it was the other people who played it.

Another friend joined us, an older girl in 5th grade. Together we formed our own group—The Stuffed Animal Club. We would all bring our stuffed animals and figurines of to school to play games with. We gave them lives with names, personalities, and stories. This might have been the beginning of my passion for storytelling, although few of our little fantasies ever reached paper.

The ironic thing about The Stuffed Animal Club was that although we were supposedly open to new members(to this day I still own a copy of one of my very own atrociously-illustrated sign up lists) it never really grew beyond three people. It’s not that people weren’t interested in our club…it was that there was always some reason why they couldn’t be part of us.

Here’s where my power came in. Whether I knew it or not, at this young age I had the power to affect other children. As “president” of my own industrious group, I had the last say in whether or not someone could join us. An incredible power for an 8-year-old.
I should say something about my fellow club-mates. Lava Monster Girl was the best friend I ever had, someone I always wanted to be like. The other, older girl, however, was actually someone I never really liked. Perhaps I was just insecure, but I always thought she was trying to steal LM girl away from me. Whenever I was with them, I always felt conspicuously like the third wheel. My power was suddenly lost, because although I was President, that older girl could always influence me.

In the 4th grade, there was one girl in particular that wanted to join us, and she was somewhat of an outcast in the school. She was the girl kids would talk about in hushed voices in the back of the class without her knowing. She was just…different. I remember someone telling me that although she was around our age, she was already wearing a bra.

It’s terrible, but being different in elementary school can cause you a lot of pain.

Rejecting her really affected me. I was already unhappy with having to refuse others, and I suppose she was that bottom can on the pyramid that made everything come crashing down. One day out of nowhere, I quit.

More precisely, I walked up to my two friends and said something along the lines of “I’m sick of being president. I quit.” It took a lot of courage for me to quit, I remember. I thought I would lose the only friends I had. The day I quit, I ran away from my friends and cried to my teacher’s aide. She reassured me that if they were truly my friends, they would not hate me for something like this. It was hard, but somehow underneath my tears and red eyes, I knew I’d done the right thing. I could not take that pressure anymore. I did not want to turn anyone down again.

Perhaps it’s silly, but being president of The Stuffed Animal Club taught me a valuable lesson about power— and people. I learned not to exclude others because someone said they were strange or because there was something different about them. And it was all thanks to that one out-of-the-ordinary girl and the others I turned down.

I have no idea where any of those people are today, but they live in my memory, always a friendly reminder. I owe them tremendously. Here’s what they deserve to hear:

Thanks for making me into a better person and teaching me to just live with the other crayons, no matter how different they may be.