I cannot stress to you how important it is to surround yourself with a core group of friends.
Here is a quick look into Nick as a middle school kid.
In the mid 90's I lived in Aviano, Italy. I went to school on the military base where my dad worked. Every military base I lived in had a different overriding culture. Some of them had more kids whose parents were higher ranking officers and so the culture was more preppy and upper class. Some of the bases had more enlisted, lower ranking soldiers and so the culture would be a bit more rough. Aviano, at this time, was a pretty rough culture. There were a lot of punk kids, druggies, and gangsters than there had been in other places I had lived.
When I was young, and even a little today, I was a cultural chameleon. In order to hide myself from others, I would change myself to whatever my surroundings were. I had to be cool. I had to be accepted. I had to be what others were. Ironically, it was directly because of this attitude and behavior that I was generally uncool, rejected by many, and a complete dork.
I remember a couple great examples of this:
1. Sagging was cool, but my parents wouldn't buy me pants that were big enough to sag. So I would wear big shirts and unbutton my pants so I could hang them down real low. Someone caught me once and told my entire speech class. Couldn't have been more embarassed then if my pants had just plain fallen off.
2. Rap music was what everyone who was anyone listened to, and if you listened to rap, you listened to Bone Thugs N Harmony. Of course, I wasn't allowed to buy those cd's and this was just about the time that Parental Advisory stickers started showing up on music so I couldn't just buy it without them knowing. So I only knew what I heard others sing. We didn't have MTV in Italy, and there was only one American radio station and it didn't play good stuff like that. There was a song called "Tha First of Da Month" and the chorus basically just repeated the title over and over again. I had heard this part before so I would typically walk around the halls repeating the chorus so that people would think I knew the song and was therefore, COOL. It might have worked had one, Marquis Something-or-other, not decided to call me out in front of the cool kids and ask me what the rest of the words were. I stuttered out something and then ran out the hallway door. I hated that Marquis kid.
3. Okay one more. The cool kids wore hair picks in their hair at this time. I thought they looked so awesome. I had pretty thick curly hair at the time, so I thought I could pull it off. The only problem was we didn't have a pick style comb at the house. I felt embarassed to ask my parents to buy one for fear that they would want to know why, so instead I just took a regular comb and stuck it in my hair and hopped on the bus. Needless to say that by the time I had made it to my first class that day, the comb had found its way to the trash can. So stupid.
I could go on and on and on about all of the ridiculous junk that I did to myself, but the reason why I have so many of these stories is because I had no friends to tell me that I was an idiot. My parents did their share, but I don't imagine many 7th grade boys listen to their parents when it comes to whether or not they should leave a comb in their hair.
God has called us to live in a community. Jesus regularly sought refuge from the masses in the company of his friends, his apostles. Follow his example and learn to trust those around you and to seek out quality people to live life with.
