Ever since I arrived in middle school I was a happy kid who was always joking around with friends and normally joking around with classmates. But this wasn’t always the case for In elementary school I was quite a bit quieter when I wasn’t surrounded by friends and I was a lot sadder than I am now. My friends know my for being the first personality described but the closer ones and a handful of band kids know my other personality.The day where more kids found out of my personality was dubbed by me as the band incident.

The story of the band incident begins with me missing an assignment that was due. What my band teacher does when we miss assignments is have all of the kids who missed an assignment play whatever assignment they missed in front of the class the day after a band concert. So the day after the Thursday concert I was mentally and physically preparing myself for playing in front of the class, but when I got to school I realized that I forgot both my mouthpiece and my music and there was no way that I could go back home and get it before school started so I had to improvise when 6th hour came along. What I did was I borrowed A mouthpiece from my band teacher and the assignment piece from the other tuba who was a friend of mine who knew about my depressed side. When it was my turn to go I decided to try and take it as non seriously as I possibly could.

But when I sat down in that big open room with all of the kids looking skeptically at me I completely blanked on how I was supposed to play and I got very nervous. The first note I played was shaky and it continued to get worse. In my peripheral vision, while playing my assignment, I could see some of the kids laughing, it wasn’t a very loud laugh, it was more of a trying to keep  in a laugh. This was one of the many things that I remember so well about this day. I could hear the

“This is why we don’t need tubas” or
“Why is he even here” coming from kids mouths. No one said this though. It was me just thinking about what was going on. The only thing I could hear that wasn’t inside of my head was my teacher telling me to grab a different mouthpiece and try again. There was a lot of things going through my mind, most of it beating myself up and thinking about what they were saying about me along with the embarrassment of not being able to remember my mouthpiece. So when I got up I was barely controlling all of my emotions and barely managed to softly put my tuba down. I took out the borrowed mouthpiece and grabbed it firmly in my left hand and walked over slowly with my head looking down at the ground to get a different mouthpiece which was in the teacher’s office, as soon as I got over to the office went to the far corner, sat down behind one of the cabinets that would make me unseen from anyone in the classroom, and I just let my emotions out by crying. I quite possibly only cried from anywhere between 2-5 minutes. But It felt like 30 minutes to me.

Every once in awhile my best friend would ask to come over to me but every time my teacher said no and explained that I just needed some space and she was right about that. When the class ended I grabbed my stuff and was met by my best friend and she questioned me about if I was ok or not and I said that I have felt better and for whatever reason, she bought that. Unfortunately for me, her class was the other way and I had to tell her that I would tell her more about the side that she saw later. When I was walking to my next class I was confronted by another one of my good friends and she knew that something was wrong and we talked about my other side and how I never wanted anyone to know about it. She told me that it was okay to let people know more about you than you want them to and she also told me that I can talk to her and any of my friends about it before she went into her next class. After I got to my class I made a decision and it was to not say a word about what happened in the previous class ever. When I got home I pretended like my day at school was good and that nothing happened.Of course, my parents found out what happened eventually and they knew that I had worse days and checked to make sure that I was ok. When Monday came around I went to school and pretended like everything was normal and my friends who weren't involved in the band never found out what happened and if they did they never asked me about it. That’s where the story ends and if it was never for this project I probably never talk about this to anyone else. But now you know my story as well and I’m perfectly fine with that now.