In the middle of eighth grade, my mother told me that she felt that it was time to move back to the United States, since she had gathered herself financially. I felt elated. I expected an entirely different world based off of episodes of Boy Meets World and dog-eared pages of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I dreamt of late nights at parks with friends, first dates at small diners, and emotional moments of self-discovery alongside best friends and cute boys who finally got me.

I moved to a small town in Tennessee, similar in size to my town in India. My first day of high school felt like a flashback to my first day of fourth grade in another country—and to of all those days spent alone at recess. Because all my classmates knew each other from middle school, I was established as the “new girl” immediately, plus, I had to readjust to American culture. Even after watching American television and grasping an understanding of the social and cultural differences within schools in India and schools in America, I didn’t know the extremity of these disparities until I experienced them.

Because of the uniformity of students’ appearances in lndia, intelligence was what mattered most to everyone, and so I mainly worried about how the way I performed in class might affect my social standing—especially because of my “stupid” accent. In America, it seemed that there was a lot more emphasis on appearance. It didn’t matter that I was the smartest girl in class—girls told me that I was ugly; I was fat; I didn’t know about “working around” the school dress code. I didn’t know that makeup and nail polish were allowed to be worn at school, or that you could do your hair any way that you wanted. I only realized my lack of “style” when, in class one day, a classmate came up to me and said, “Why’re you wearing that shirt? It’s ugly and wrinkled. And I can see your bra through it. No one wears plain white bras.” My dreams of secrets shared over french fries and starry nights with friends were crushed, all because of the color of my underwear.

Although I knew my appearance didn’t really have to prevent me from forming relationships with people, I felt as though the cultural barrier that made it difficult to comprehend absolutely did. Having to readjust to different social environments made me feel like there was a cultural barrier built around me in India, despite being of Indian descent, and in America, despite being a U.S. citizen and living here before I had even been abroad. No matter how I dressed or spoke or behaved, I would always be the girl with the weird name, the stupid American girl, the ugly Indian girl. All at once.

Although I found a group of friends during my junior year, when I had finally been confident enough to get rid of the baggy clothes (and found some cuter undergarments), I struggled to accept them. I didn’t understand why my friends were allowed to go out on weeknights, since my cultural values prohibited me from doing the same. I felt that they weren’t raised well; they didn’t have their priorities in line; they wouldn’t go anywhere in life. A friend from our group simply responded: “How can you condemn us for doing normal things that teenagers do? Does the way you prioritize your life make you better than us?”

Friendship seemed like a farce, because I wasn’t really embracing who I was around my newfound pals—I was just trying to make everyone else feel comfortable when they were around me. I pretended to fangirl over boy bands because I felt that otherwise our group wouldn’t have purpose, even though I couldn’t have cared less about rumors about the members’ love lives or about their frequently changing hairstyles. l ignored my mother’s calls and text messages when I began to stay out late eating or driving around with my friends because I didn’t want to be that girl who needed to go home early, even though I wanted to cuddle with my mother and watch a rom-com. Whenever someone made a completely ignorant comment about my culture, like the time someone joked about me sleeping on a dirt floor while I lived in India, I kept my mouth shut, even though I had a strong opinion, and my opinion mattered to me a lot.

Putting up this front was exhausting. I had to constantly watch myself and do what I thought would make my friends happy and comfortable, but not me. So, I tried something completely different and developed a defense mechanism: Whenever someone made me feel uncomfortable about who I was, I insulted them. Whenever I felt that someone was beginning to put me down, or looking at me weirdly, or distancing themselves from me, I began to do what I was used to people doing to me before they could. I insulted who they were. Their intelligence, where they were from—the things they couldn’t help, the things they couldn’t change. I was smarter, I was so exotic, I wasn’t from this provincial town, no, I was a city girl, and therefore I was better, so fuck you if you’re trying to hurt me, you’re the one who deserves to be hurt. Once, one of my friends said, “Yeah, you think you’re better than us because you’ve traveled here and there, you’ve lived in this place and tried that cuisine, you’re so much smarter because you take so many AP classes, but we don’t actually give a fuck. None of that means you’re better than us.” I just laughed and kept acting like they were jealous of me.

At first, it seemed easier, because I didn’t need to pretend I was someone else, or hide who I actually was because I was afraid of people hurting me. I could hurt people instead. Friendship was no longer a compromise based on hiding who I was. Instead, it became disposable and insignificant. After a small misunderstanding or an argument, I could easily cut off and stop talking to someone who I had spent weekends with, laughed on the phone with, and even cried with. It was the worst way to handle my built-up feelings of rejection. I pushed people away as I became harsher—and secretly more afraid than I ever was before. A friend would try to give me advice or send me a text message to cheer me up whenever I was stressed out, and I would criticize every aspect of it, only to wish I had that kind of attention and help after l had alienated them from me during rough times later on, or when I recalled those moments whenever I was feeling down, the happy and the sad moments, and they suddenly seemed so valuable.