Izuku's guide on how to survive middle school

Step 3

Don't be too loud
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Shhhhhhh...
Can you hear that?
That's the sound of silence

Like I mentioned in the previous step, I have a mumbling problem. There are times when my thoughts get so chaotic that my brains only way of regulating them is letting them spew out of my mouth in a frantic manner until I have made sense of whatever I was thinking about.

According to my mother, I started doing that when I was still very young. She had said it was my five year old self's way of trying to understand the world around me. Apparently, I was not the type of child who would question it's mother or the teachers about everything, but rather, I would try to figure it out myself.

That sounds strange and all, until you realize that my younger self had clearly lost trust on my teachers after my classmates started name calling me and they didn't interfere. So, thank you elementary school teachers, because you are the ones that gave me my first, out of many, tics.

Now, I know what you are going to say. Mumbling is not a tic. Well, you are right. It really isn't. For me, however, it acts like one, since nowadays I seem to mumble specifically when I get nervous or anxious over a situation. I guess regulating my thoughts has now gone into another level.

Personally, it never really bothered me. If it could help me understand things better, then mumbling was welcome to do as it pleased. My teachers had never really mentioned it before, only appearing slightly irritated at the noise disturbance but nothing more. My own mother, of all people, had even said it was cute.

Well, it's a pity that no one in middle school seemed to appreciate it. If you were careful enough, I had mentioned before that I had started to suppress that habit of mine. I have been trying to be more quite, less noisy, more normal and not all that creepy.

Wanna know why? Well, let me tell you a story then.

I was finishing my first year of middle school at this point. Luckily, I had managed to survive through all the bullying, meaning I was feeling pretty good about myself. End of the year exams were just around the corner and everyone seemed to get all the more anxious, myself not being an exception.

It really wasn't about passing the class. No. Few were the people that had to worry about that. It was all about having that perfect record. Or, at least a good enough one that would not sabotage your chances at being accepted into a prestigious hero school. Because, believe me when I say, you are not the only one hoping to get in, so, the big schools always use different methods of filtering out nominees before they reach the stage of the examination. And, of course, you don't want to be one of them.

So, with everyone focused on their futures, I would say they had forgotten about me. Not completely, of course. I still had my daily beating. But it was not half as bad as it used to be. Apparently, they were so preoccupied studying that they didn't have time to deal with me. And I was ecstatic about that.

Since these were highly supervised exams, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that the bullies couldn't really take advantage of me for a better grade. Which meant that now, they had to focus, for once, in their own education, trying to catch up in a years worth of subjects. On the same time, I was doing my revision, far more knowledgeable than any of them were while planing the perfect way of scoring high, but not higher than Kacchan.