Outsider
I must have been reasonably self-aware as a kid because I’m pretty sure I was in the early stages of primary school when Ifigured out that I couldn’t make friends.
When you’re a kid, you look for easy excuses to explain away anything difficult to understand. I had ginger hair, so at first this was easy: I looked different, so I WAS different. The only fly in the ointment was a slightly older ginger kid in the upper end of the same class who seemed to make friends with comparative ease: so it wasn’t the hair.
I came from a single-parent family and didn’t have a dad, so that was the first big excuse I used to explain away my lack of class popularity. I went to a primary school in Ramsgate that I have now come to understand was full of the middle-class kids of teachers, doctors and other noteworthy professions that – at the time – were considered acceptable. In my class, not having a dad was a genuinely unusual situation (though I’ve since discovered that in several neighbouring schools it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as unusual).
Once I’d cheerfully managed to ignore all the kids who I felt were judging me for this, I moved my focus to the difference in wealth. A lot of these kids had the latest Nikes; I had charity-shop Hi-Techs. They had designer backpacks and lunchboxes; I didn’t. In time, this felt like such an imbalance that I managed to persuade my incredibly hard- working mum to GET me a set of the best attire (that I didn’t really want) to help mefit in.
It didn’t work.