This is similar to my formative years. At 5 1/2, moved to a new city. Was bullied as the outsider foreigner kid until around 12 when we moved to another city. W

This is similar to my formative years. At 5 1/2, moved to a new city. Was bullied as the outsider foreigner kid until around 12 when we moved to another city. Was bullied again as the outsider foreigner kid. I turned into a depressed, "emo", grumpy kid around 8-12 and that became an angry, misunderstood kid after the second move. It has been decades since that time, but I am doing better now. Being depressed, moody, overly serious, is my default now. I've learned to work past it like you've described, change my outlook. It still sucks having a default downer attitude in my head though. Still more work to go. My parents and siblings were always perplexed by this. To this day, they still think nothing is wrong with how it all went down. I was just a "problem kid". That worked for them, problem kid was a convenient scape-goat for all the other familial difficulties we had going on. If I ever have kids, I'll do my best to not disrupt their lives the way mine was. Hopefully, I'll be a lot more attuned to make sure they're dealing with social pressures better than I did. No one needs to live the way I lived, it's not mentally healthy.