I tried to look "normal"; I put my hair in curlers when I went to sleep, and bought clothes that I thought looked like the ones the other girls wore. They weren't, of course, and my carefully curled hair went limp and stringy by lunchtime, because that's the kind of hair I have. Of course, a big part of the problem was that I was two years younger than anyone else in my class; what looked right on a 14-year-old just looked pathetic on an underdeveloped 12-year-old. (I was also advised to try to "act normal", but I simply wasn't able to.)