The person I am at this present time is just a combination of every lesson I have learned throughout my life by experience. The most important lesson I have learned is that trying too hard will get you nowhere. There is always some way to make life easier. The only problem is finding that method. Throughout my life I have been pretty good at finding those methods, but some weren’t found easily.

At the beginning of grade school I learned that starting things on the right foot with teachers led to favoritism. Getting good grades didn’t just earn favoritism though. A person must come off as well mannered and respectable, too. After getting on the good side of both of my first and second grade teacher I felt like I could get away with anything. I never got in trouble for goofing around or anything and to top it off I had passed the test to be in my school’s gifted program, so I felt like I had it all. Then came the start of the third grade. I met my teacher and I could tell from the start that she had it in for me. Everything I did she graded harder than the rest of the student’s work. She always would say “You are in gifted you should be doing better than this”. After I made it through that year I changed my outlook on how to make my first impression on teachers. Even through high school I used the same outlook. Get on the good side first and then let loose. As I got older this got a lot easier. The age range between the teachers and I got smaller so it was easier to find something in common and use that to get on their good side.

The hardest lesson to learn was how to fit in with other people. As I got older I learned that being smart wasn’t the way to do it. Nobody likes it when someone else knows more than them. So I wouldn’t open my mouth when somebody was wrong or was just pretending to know what they were talking about, and I knew they were wrong. I would just sit back quietly and go with the flow.

Once high school started, fitting in had moved to a whole other level. After elementary school three schools came together for high school. It was grades seven through twelve. All of my classes were with different people, which meant I had to start making friends all over again. This was hard for me; because I liked the group of friends I had and really didn’t develop the skills to meet new people. To top it off my best friend who had been my neighbor my entire life woke up one morning to find his mom fighting with his dad and she got so upset she drove off and left Pennsylvania. About a week later I found out they had moved to Texas. Since my town was so small, it was hard to find someone else my age to hang out with. Eventually I met a kid who had moved into the neighborhood around that same time, who was three or four years older than me.

The kid quickly became my best friend, which wasn’t good from my mother’s standpoint. I was in high school like I was going to listen to who my friends should be. Obviously another philosophy I haven’t quite fully grasped is “mother knows best”, because she was right. Within two weeks I started drinking with him and his friends who were the same age or older than him. Every night I went out I would lie to my mom and tell her I was somewhere I wasn’t. Then the fall of my eighth grade year I basically became a waste. I didn’t care about school work. I went from straight A’s to B’s and C’s. I quit playing football and I had got in some trouble that summer for toilet papering the same house three times in a week. Because of everything I did people at school started paying attention to me because I knew older kids and got in trouble. Then the night before Thanksgiving my friends thought it would be cool to go out and have a little fun. Included in this fun was stealing porch furniture from neighboring camps and burning it with gasoline. This woke up one of the neighbors and he came over and reported us to the police. In the morning I tried to lie my way out of it, but when the cop came to my house I knew I was in some trouble. I didn’t get the kind of punishment most would expect for an eighth grade in this sort of trouble. I was punished through words. The only thing my mother said to me was, “Thanks for ruining Thanksgiving”. This hit me harder than any punishment that I could have gotten. I walked away from that mess lucky with some important knowledge to follow me. I now and will always know the best way to stay out of trouble is “Don’t get caught” as my uncle put it best after that incident.

After that I decided I needed to do better in school and I started to work the teachers over so they would like me. Math came easy to me so I never had to try in it. But when it came to English I had to work to get a grade. Obviously if any reads this they will know that. I figured out though our English papers ere graded on opinion, because there really is no right or wrong answer it is just what the teacher thinks of the paper, so when they liked me it was helpful for getting me good grades on my papers.

The final important thing I learned was how to get in good with adults that I met. For males a solid handshake when introduced was the best way to be accepted. Females were a little more complicated, but I eventually learned mother’s love a teenager with good manners. So I abused the words “Please” and “Thank You” when I was around them. Once I was considered a nice well mannered child, nothing could change this opinion. When I met one of my dad’s friends out in public or at the bar where I worked; the best way to get them to like me was to be as confident as I could when I spoke to them. If I treated them like I was already their friend and that I knew them well I was accepted and they treated me with respect.

This is really just an overview of who I am. I find that this was the best way to describe me as me. What I cited today are the main points that helped shape the person I am, but really there is more to me I just don’t have the energy or the time to go into that much detail.

Starting out with a story like PghFfNarrative is a great way to get the readers attention and keep it.

Stating how your friends describe you is a good way I could have started like in AlisonsThoughtsNarrative, because all of my friends have really interesting things to say about me.