I spent the first two years of high school trying to fit in with a certain crowd. Needless to say, it didn't work, and one fine day I realized that I was putting quite a lot of time and effort into being friends with this group of people that I didn't even respect.

I know totally what you mean. I'm lucky, though, that I figured that out pretty early. I changed schools five years in a row (3rd-7th grade each in a new school), so by 6th grade I was completely over any desire to fit in with the "in crowd." I'd seen the arbitrary and ridiculous way that such things worked in many different school cultures and didn't see any reason to keep trying to change myself to that particular school's social norm (especially when you're going from, like, a Catholic school in Indiana to a private secular school in Puerto Rico--there is no way that you're going to "fit in" with the popular crowd).

My problem in high school was more with the administration and its repression of any type of nonconformity, its horrific double-standards, its harsh punishment of anyone who deviated from the norm while it always looked the other way when "normal" kids broke the rules, its refusal to allow us to engage in intellectual or artistic endeavors related to anything other than the most utterly bland, conservative-approved topics, etc.

Luckily things get much better after high school.

You can say that again. :)