When I was thirteen, we moved to New Jersey from California. We had moved to California from New Jersey. So essentially, we were moving back to New Jersey. I was just about to start eighth grade, and the words New and Jersey were the worst words in the English language to me. They were vinegar and all things rotten. They were my past. They were equal to the words No Flipping Way Am I Moving Back to New Jersey!

If you remember the myriad of horrors that make up middle school, you will recall that seventh grade is where you make the friends that you will have in the eighth grade. You come into seventh grade all nervous and geeky and somehow find a few fellow nervous, geeky kids to be friends with, and then the summer happens and you come back for eighth grade all cool and teenagerish, thinking you have no work to do, that you made your friends. Thinking that you were the coolest in the school. (We rule! We know everything!)

Little did you know that starting ninth grade and high school would be a whole new game of terror, but hey, you’d cross that bridge when you came to it. For now, you were the oldest and the best, and eighth grade was going to be a breeze!

Right.

So I wandered into middle school (otherwise known as Hell) with my bangs and my I hate New Jersey attitude to a whole slew of already formed cliques and friendships.

Luckily, I had a really “popular” cousin who was a year younger, in the seventh grade. He wasn’t a blood cousin, but someone we grew up calling cousin for some reason. People begrudgingly talked to me because I was the cousin of So and So. I was So and So’s not real cousin-cousin and, thus, was not completely ostracized as I might have been had I come in as nobody’s cousin at all. Thank God for not real cousin-cousins.

Eighth grade was a dark and moody nine months. I resented my mother for moving us back to New Jersey. I hated the weather and the way people spoke. When we first moved back, we had to live with the not real cousin-cousins. All of us. Me, my mother, and my sister squashed with all our girl stuff and junk in this one little guest room at the top of the stairs that was usually used to store wrapping paper and boxes.

I had to take the bus to school, whereas in California I had always walked. California was like the cool kid, and New Jersey, with its busses, was the nerd.

No one talked to me during those first few weeks on the bus. This was way before cell phones or iPads, so there was nothing to distract you from the nobody likes me and I have no one to talk to so I will just sit and stare out the window or read. 

I read a lot.

I remember finally being invited out with the popular kids. Somehow. Probably because of my false relation to the not real cousin-cousin. Here’s what “going out” consisted of when I was in eighth grade. A bunch of us would go to someone’s house and go down the basement, and someone would shut the lights, and everyone would make out with each other. They called it “hooking up.” With everyone else in the same room, they slurped and sucked.

So it was all dark and hot in whoever’s basement we happened to be in, and there’d be six or eight couples hooking up in/on whatever open space they could find. Including the floor.

Except me.

I forgot about this until last night while I was talking to my friend’s twelve-year-old daughter.

Let’s call her Sammy. Sammy is in sixth grade. Sixth grade is now middle school as opposed to in my day when it was still elementary school. Sammy is in the unfortunate landscape of middle school at twelve years old. She kept talking to me about this group called The Populars. Sammy isn’t in The Populars but rather the Middle of the Road group, as she called it. She’s kind of friends with everyone, and she likes Minecraft. (What is Minecraft? I had to ask, and, at this point in time, I am still unsure.) She has a crush on one kid, and we text each other, but that’s it!

I am fascinated by the so-called The Populars. I told her I didn’t really remember any specifically popular kids. That’s when I had the flashback of those dark basement nights in South Jersey. I wanted to vomit right there in her house in the Washington mountains, which was far, far away in time and space from those horny basement nights, but you could’ve fooled me. There I was, biting my nails in the dark, praying for the night to be over. Or praying for someone to ask me to hook up.

Everyone else would be making out and getting their boobs felt or unbuttoning their pants, and I just sat alone in a chair in the dark.

I had blocked this memory out until Sammy started talking about The Populars. 

You see, it was like I had been invited in but then made to wait outside.

You can come; you can’t really be part of us.

You can sit in the dark and listen to us kissing and sucking each other’s faces though, if you want. 

I literally sat in a rocking chair and waited for the night to end. Sometimes, I had a cat on my lap. Sometimes, I just sat there and cried quietly. I am not sure why I even said yes to going in the first place. The only thing I can think of is that I wanted to be accepted so fiercely, to not have to sit on the bus staring out the window by myself, that I was willing to sit in the dark while a whole bunch of horny thirteen and fourteen year olds slobbered on each other.

Let me tell you what this made me feel like: Shit, Worthless, Ugly, Pathetic, Loser.

You name it.  Yet, every time they asked me to “go out,” I said yes, despite knowing that I would sit alone in a chair and not be made out with but rather made to listen to humping noises. There was no actual sex involved, but there might as well have been. It was humiliating, and yet I kept saying Okay, sure, I’ll come. Thanks for asking me. Thanks for letting me be your friend.

Why didn’t any of the boys ask me to make out? I don’t know. I was awkward, sure. During the summer between eighth and ninth grade, I blossomed.

Beyond that, it was a simple equation of Us and Them. I was not an Us. I was a Them that had been granted access but not love. Not acceptance.

I had been let in to hang on the sidelines but not allowed to play on the field. I was an invisible. I was a body on a chair in a dank basement in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I was never seen.

They were too busy kissing the same faces to notice a new one.

All that changed in ninth grade, and that is all fine and good, and a big eff you to all the boys who ignored me because, by ninth grade, I was being paid attention to by the older guys, and I couldn’t care less about the ones in my own grade.

I just posted something about this on my Facebook page. I am fascinated by how many of us experienced some version of being either left out or of being the leaver-outer.

Someone posted: “Jennifer, I am often amazed at the breathtaking way you have shared your pain and joy…so I will take heart from your courage and share with you my ‘left out story.’ My best friend from junior high whom I absolutely loved and adored dumped me the summer between junior high and high school for a new friend with better connections to the ‘in’ crowd. There we were, starting a new school year with our lockers right next to each other as we had planned, and she would barely talk to me. The only answer I got from her, after I begged to know what had happened, was that ‘it wasn’t me; it was her.’ I’m sure that was true. I was never going to be one of the ‘cool’ crowd…at least that was the reason I came up with since she wouldn’t tell me for certain what happened. That didn’t help ease the pain for me much at the time, and I went into overdrive trying to ‘fix’ the situation by blaming myself and trying to figure out what I had done wrong to lose her friendship. I know now that wasn’t the best way to deal with the situation, but I will admit that, even now, the mystery of ‘why did she drop me?’ still stings a bit when I think it.”

Reading that and listening to twelve-year-old Sammy talk about The Populars brought back that feeling of wanting to be accepted, of saying yes to things I didn’t want to do because I thought they would make me loved.

I don’t know who the girl is that wrote that post on my Facebook, but I want to ask her for a glass of wine and take the slight sting away. But I know that’s me wanting to fix it. I want to go back in time and befriend her younger self and say It wasn’t you at all. And the cool crowd stinks. It’s the nerds and the geeks that end up being the ones we want to be with when we grow up. They are the ones who invent iPods and Macs and write awesome books. But I don’t know if I knew all that back then, so I will leave it at my thirty-something self telling her adult self: The “cool people” still suck. I am sorry that you had that hurt, and I hope that you found a way to heal and to love better for it.

Sammy told me that The Populars were mean and talked behind people’s backs and didn’t listen to the teachers but that everyone put up with them and was sort of scared of them.

Oh, the fear. The fear of being unlovable or not wanted. The fear of being ostracized or not picked for the team or sitting in the basement alone in a sea of couples. The things we do to not have to face that fear. To feel just a little tiny bit loved.

I try in my small ways to cultivate acceptance and love. Why do you think I call my students and the people in my workshops and retreats my Tribe? It’s like I am saying You! You over there, by the lockers! You in the basement on that chair! You on the bus! You! Come over here. You are part of something. There is no “us” and “them.”

But hey, it exists. Who am I kidding?

It always will exist, that Us and Them. The Populars. The Rich and the Poor. I can see that just by talking to a twelve year old and by looking at Facebook and even by watching some other yoga teachers.

What I can do, however, is my best. I can hope that I set an example of what it means to love one another without fear and to be inclusive and loving.

If you’re on the outside looking in, first ask yourself, do I even want to be on the inside? 

And then ask yourself what the inside even is. And if it is something that polarizes or leaves people feeling unwanted, then say Hell No and Thank you, but I will stay here on the outside, and, in fact, I am done looking in.

And then move away from the glass.

If you are on the inside, here’s a word to the wise: The Populars suck. You are being The Populars right now by making an inside and an outside. Erase that invisible line you’ve created between yourself and everyone else before it erodes everything and becomes impossible to erase.

Once you step out from the cocoon of the inside, you will see there is a whole world of wacky and loving people waiting to ride the bus with you.

Problem is, when you are living in that insular bubble you’ve created, you might as well be back in that basement in New Jersey. And you might as well get over the fact that you are going to keep swapping spit with the same people over and over for the rest of your life until you get out of the cage you are living in.

Do your best to bridge the distances. There will always be some distances. We cannot possibly make out with every person in line, but we can offer our kindness. We can say Hey you! Yes, you, sitting all alone in that chair in the basement while everyone around you is making out, why don’t we turn on the lights and look at you?

And you know what? The Us and Them gets smaller and then the them gets dropped and it’s just us. It’s just us.

And you realize, it’s always been just us.

Jennifer Pastiloff was recently featured on Good Morning America. She is a yoga teacher, writer, and advocate for children with special needs based in L.A. She is also the creator of Manifestation Yoga® and leads retreats and workshops all over the world. Jennifer is currently writing a book and has a popular daily blog called Manifestation Station. Find her on Facebook and Twitter and take one of her yoga classes online at Yogis Anonymous.

Jen will be leading a Manifestation Writing/Yoga® week long retreat in Tuscany July 2013 as well as a writing/yoga retreat with best selling author Emily Rapp (whom TIME magazine voted as having one of the best twenty-five blogs of 2012).

*Image courtesy of Simplereminders.com