Personal Narrative: My Experience Of An Outsider

Feeling like an outsider is something I do on a daily. Ever since I could remember I had always felt like I didn’t belong. Whether that was because I was taller than most kids my age, or I was always at least two years younger than all of my classmates. I had always felt different, almost as if I was supposed to be born in another time.The need to belong is one of the fundamental needs within all humanity as we all feel the need to "fit in". My most memorable experience of feeling like an outsider by far was when I moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic.
Transitioning to a new country is hard enough for anyone and when you add public/social pressure to "fit in" it makes it even harder particularly for a eleven year old. The transition between cultures, language, and school system had a great impact on my grades and my social life. Having attended Private school in a small town such as the one in Nagua, Dominican Republic were all of my classmates I knew since birth and the school staff were like family …show more content…
I was placed in the ELLA program, intended to help not English-speaking students to not only learn the English language but also help them transition academically. But in my case being in the ELLA program rather than help me it buried me deeper into a segregated space, making me feel like more of an outsider than I already was. One example was lunch time. Lunch time was the only time we were all allowed to be in the same room with all the other kids, but even so we all felt like we were separated. The lunch room was by far the biggest room in the entire school as it shared the other half of the room with the auditorium, it had tall ceilings, green floors, and white brick walls. At lunchtime all the kids from the program would all sit in the same table, the first table in the cafeteria by the stairs to be exact, as we all felt like as soon as lunch was over we needed to make an escape as quick as