Essay On Mt. Horeb

As human beings we inherently fear change, especially those of us with social shortcomings, who prefer routine schedules to overwhelmingly new experiences and unpredictability. Such was the case for me. My family moved when I was just turning three years old to Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, a small town of about 8,000 people, located about thirty miles from Madison. Mount Horeb is a quaint suburb known for its Norwegian heritage. It is a fine place to raise a family, but as I got older, I realized that I no longer felt welcomed and sheltered by the small and tightly-knit community, but rather I felt trapped, paralyzed by the limitations of a suffocating town.
As a child, I was extremely shy, and as a big sister, I was forced to be the leader, a role I was terribly underprepared for. Throughout elementary and middle school I tried as much as possible to stay invisible. I had three to five close friends, never raised my hand in class, and was happy to go unnoticed. However, with freshman year fast approaching, I was given the chance to decide which high school I wanted to attend, Verona …show more content…
In Mount Horeb, I felt like an outsider - an introvert in a town where being smart automatically made you a “nerd” and therefore “uncool.” In Mount Horeb, you were either “popular” or you weren’t, but in Verona, I discovered, there was so much more than just “cool” and “uncool.” For the first time in my life I had the chance to have a friend group that I truly felt welcomed and appreciated by, I had friends who shared my same interests. It was also great to have friends who understood what swimming meant to me. In Mount Horeb, most of my friends would be considered “nerds,” but at Verona, they were just people, not “popular” or “unpopular”, just a group of friends. Not having to focus on being “popular” lifted an enormous amount of stress off of me, which allowed me to be able to grow and not be afraid of how people viewed