I came across a photo of myself at age six in a pumpkin patch. I was dressed in a light yellow shirt which matched the fall colors of the pumpkins and leaves around me. My head was tilted slightly, as it always seemed to be, and I was smiling sweetly at the camera, while holding a little white pumpkin. I found this picture in my mother’s scrapbook. The caption above it says that I “picked out a white pumpkin, because it was different.” I’ve always loved the fall. My birthday is in September, Halloween is in October, and November brings Thanksgiving. The leaves are beautiful to look at, but even better to hear. That crunch sound that the leaves make under your feet is one of my favorite in the world. I love the colors. Everything follows this…show more content… Those first few years of elementary school, I was a completely different person than I am now. My hand was the first one up in class. I was the first to volunteer to read aloud. I never even considered what people thought about me. That same year in school as the picture was taken, I was placed in the gifted program, which was called “Horizons.” I had a couple friends in it with me, too. I loved that class. It challenged me to think critically and be creative in new ways that my regular class didn’t. I remained in the gifted program throughout elementary and middle school, but somewhere along the way, something changed. It’s not that I stopped enjoying it, but there were more and more occurrences as I got older that I felt singled out, and I felt different than everyone else. When I switched schools in third grade, I was the only one in my class that went to Horizons. They didn’t have the program at the school, so I had to leave every Monday morning on a bus over to another elementary school, Green Tree. We would spend the whole day there, and we would eat lunch with the Green Tree kids. But I didn’t know them. I always felt self-conscious eating with them, because I was just this random girl in their class only one day a week that didn’t know anyone. Every week I dreaded that, but it wasn’t the class itself that I dreaded, so I stayed enrolled. But as I got older, I consistently became more and more insecure about it,…show more content… It’s great to be unique. Think outside the box. Be yourself. But as you get older, while that statement may still be true, people don’t act as if it is. Mankind has always disliked those who are different. People don’t like what they don’t understand. When you get older, gossip spreads, rumors fly, and people judge. It’s a fact of life. Races have been persecuted because their skin was a different color. We have slurs and labels towards those whose sexuality is different than the norm. Members of both genders are often shoved into an impossible, stereotypical box of ideals that they’re expected to obtain. Often, we look at those with tattoos and piercings as delinquents, rather than just people who express themselves in their own