When I was twelve is when my eyes first opened up that I maybe needed different people to hang out with. That some people were trying to grow up too fast. That some people were pretty immature. They were considered the cooler group of people. Everyone tries to grow up too fast and do stuff that someone in high school would be doing rather than what twelve year old girls should be doing. My mom wasn’t telling I couldn’t be friends with them, but then after awhile, you start noticing stuff on your own.

I talk with my friend a lot about my relationship with my brother. He's 16. We don't talk anymore. He just stopped talking. I grew up in Katmandu. We were raised by my grandparents so I was together with him there and then when I moved here I was together with him too so it's like we've been together all of our lives. He cared about me a lot and I remember when he cried I used to cry because I didn't like him crying.  He doesn't talk that much with my parents either now.  It started in 8th grade. It's already tenth grade now and it's been a long time that my parents have had a good talk with him. But I think he's still more closer to me than our parents. I think it has to do with him, his age and he's started to grow older, I guess.  I actually think I'm becoming closer to that stage as I have more problems and I am too embarrassed to say them to my mom. I say them to my friend but I'm too embarrassed to talk about it with my mom or dad.

What's important to me right now is being able to empathize with other people and understanding what they may be feeling or what affects them. I feel like a lot of people, especially when they are going through a hard age and time, like now, they want to be able to open up to someone, for someone to understand what's happening, and for them to be able to open up and trust them. That's really valuable to have someone you really trust, to have someone you really feel you can trust your real personality with, you know? And that's who I want to be to my friends.

I just really like the way I look. I feel that picture is almost breaking stereotypes and I just really like that it’s showing a strong girl. It’s a really strong pose and as a girl, we don’t usually get labelled as strong sometimes. Well, when I think, “girl" I think strong and powerful but sometimes other people think, “Not really strong, can’t play sports, can’t do a lot of things.” But it’s not really true.

When I think of myself at 12 years old I think of this little weakling and it kinda of annoys me. Like there were a lot of missed opportunities when I was 12. I was so small and a late bloomer and insecure. I’m still evolving, I’m still young. But now I definitely have a sense of who I am, like I’m not going to let people push me around anymore or let myself down, because I think I definitely created my own misery. So now I am stronger and I’m going to try to not let that happen again.

You want to do everything. You want to be friends with someone. You want to be enemies with the same person. There’s drama, artificial drama and real drama and then not-drama and none of it’s drama because you’re just in 7th grade.

So at my old school I remember in 6th grade my grades were really bad, they weren’t terrible but they were on the lower side of average. And I didn’t care. Sometimes, I thought that mean jokes were funny and my old friends, when they did things to get attention or did little things to people who were supposed to be their friends, I just went along with it because I didn’t know what else to say. If I kept doing that I don’t know what would have happened. I’m really glad that I didn’t stay.

When you go on Instagram and you see all of these girls who are my age who have their stomach out and long nails and all that, you feel like, “Oh, I want to do that!” But then when your parents say no you feel like you’re not like everyone else. But then you realize that’s a good thing because you want to be original.

It’s very, very difficult to stop being friends with someone but remain friendly with them. I know people I was extremely close to and now am not friend with at all. The way that I felt I had to go about that was completely stopping all communications with them. And not looking at them, talking to them, interacting with them at all. And I think that is also a kind of immaturity that I still don’t really feel able to properly cut myself off from someone in a mature way. The lack of maturity that I have and the overt immaturely of other people I think has kept me from being able to have mature endings to friendships.

I would say being 12 is an awkward, fun, exciting, horrible, nerve racking, interesting, and figuring out who you are kind of age. For me, all I wanted was to turn 13 because I would officially be a teenager. Honestly, I'm not sure why I wanted to be a 13 year old. I guess it was that I wasn't happy with the age 12 or the number 12. It's sort of in the middle of child-child-hood and then a jump to a teenager because 11 would be the child-child hood, 12 would be the awkward middle then 13 would be full teenager. All I wanted was to be 13 and get the year over with.

I’ve always people have told me that I’m just really out there, which is good. I think it’ll be good in the long run. That I’m a lot to handle. Maybe.

My school goes from 6-12 and I see 12th graders kissing in the halls and it makes me feel kinda uncomfortable so I know that me, right now, I wouldn’t be able to be in a relationship and I don’t want to be in a relationship. I like romance in books, romance in tv, romance in movies, but I don’t like it in real life too much. At least not yet.

I sing in church and this year I actually participated in the school talent show, which was fun. I sang this song called Rise Up by Andra Day. And it was quite terrifying considering it was school but I still sang. I was kinda freaking out but I was like, “You can do this! You need to just keep going!” I really wanted to do it for a while and I had friends who were telling me that I can do it, that I have a lot of talent. They were very supportive.

I have different relationships with my groups of friends. One, it’s all about books and studying and talking about grades. Maybe asking, “Oh, what’s for homework this night?” Whereas the friends who are boys, they curse a lot and there’s not as much drama, at least not mental drama. Physically, they are all over the place. I used to hang out with this group of boys, we played tag during recess and we did a lot of physical things that were teasing. For example, they’d jump over my head but I was fine with that. It was physical testing. I liked it more than mental testing which happens with some of my girlfriends.