My personality is introverted ,and I don’t really like to talk to strangers, so it is difficult to make friends. When I first came to the United States, my English was terribly bad. And I lived in a Chinese homestay far away from the school. In the living environment, I could not get exercised in my English, and with my introverted personality, my first year of high school in the United States was my life’s low. Being isolated by others, I experienced the feeling of loneliness and helpless. I was being so jealous of people who are vibrant and loquacious. For me, at that time, every day was monotonous; I was living between two points: school and home. I was being maudlin by feeling that I my life would never become better.
After a period of pain, I began to get close to the people and things around me, began to pay attention to other people’s interests, and began to try to integrate into other people’s friend circles. I did that because I know the depression will change my life or even ends my life. So I started to change myself. I lost weight; I lost 40 pounds in five months. After that, I moved to an American homestay house: Milissa and Mike’s homestay house. They treated me very nice, and they often chat with me about things going on in their lives or the country. Therefore, my English have improved a bit. The people around me began to look at me as a whole different person, and I finally experienced the sunny side of the life at that time.
I started noticing a person. His name is Tim. He had always been a short hair, dark skin, tall, with a pair of square glasses, and he was very thin. He and I were students who entered the school at the same time, and because I didn’t dare to touch others, so I didn’t pay attention to him. However, from a “normal person’s” point of view, he was too abnormal. He was a very isolated person, or he could be said to be a bit extreme. Sometimes someone took the initiative to talk to him, he putted on a look of disapproval, but sometimes he will take the initiative to talk to others. For example, in class, the classmate next to him wants to borrow his rubber, but he just doesn’t borrow and asks him why he doesn’t talk. But sometimes, when we talk about some topics, such as some of the games we are talking about or the anime we watch, he will run over and say, “Do you play this or watch this?” However, there was nobody paid attention to him. The students didn’t like him because they felt that his EQ was naive, unsocial, and too extreme. Some students deliberately bullied him and laughed at him.
So I chose to do something alone in order to understand what was going on in his inner world. I started to take the initiative to him. Sometimes I feel strange to myself, because I didn’t have much contact with him before, and I started to have some contact with him. I noticed that he would always play games on his tablet. I would go to see what he was playing, then privately download. And then if I see him playing this game again, I would talk to him about how the game should be played. Gradually, I felt that he started to let go of me. Sometimes he started to say “Hi” to me, and sometimes he would take the initiative to talk to me about the game. When I felt that our distance was gradually being pulled in by me, I started the next step. I started to engage with him about what he would do at home, and I was asking how was his relationship with his family. Usually, his aunt took care of her. But I heard from his words that he didn’t like his aunt very much. He especially avoided this conversation. I judged that he had immature thoughts and movements as a child because he had a family trauma when he was a child. This made him himself refused to grow up, because he had never forgotten the memory of that time. Or his brain has been forgotten, but his body maneuver still retains the rejection of the conditioned reflex at that time. Some things happened when he was a child made him refuse to contact others and retained his childhood character and characteristics. I am not a senior psychologist. I can’t judge him with professional psychological symptoms, in-depth psychotherapy and provide professional medical advice, but I feel that I can help him in school life. I can’t completely erase his inner hurt, I am very sorry. But after I observed and helped him for more than a month, he became more cheerful to me, at least to me. Sometimes he smiles at me, which makes me very happy. I can’t help him for a lifetime, but I ,at least, wanted him to have friends when he was in high school. One was enough.
