High school is a crazy time in everyone’s lives, whether that experience is positive or negative. You’re just beginning to learn about who you are.
You’re also learning just as much about the type of people you want to surround yourself with.
If you’re from a high school where no one really understands your point of view or finds interest in your hobbies, that’s okay — wait until university.
You’ll have plenty of opportunities to be exposed to students who may share similar interests and values, more than those in high school.
While I agree that those who can’t seem to get past high school are trapped in a delusional bubble., I don’t agree that relationships some of us do foster within those four or five years are trivial.
You may not have found like-minded individuals to create lifelong bonds with in high school, but don’t discount the experiences of others who have.
I found my best friends in those years. It may have had something to do with being in a program with like-minded individuals, but I found my people.
Even in high school, we all wanted to experience new friendships, but we knew that we held a special bond, so much so that we didn’t reveal our final university decisions until they were concrete. We didn’t want to stick together too much that we wouldn’t grow as individuals.
At the beginning of my first year, I too bought into the idea that maybe my high school relationships weren’t as strong as I believed. Maybe I should distance myself from those friends because real friends are only made in university.
It took me about two weeks to realize how toxic that sort of thinking can be.
I was letting others change my perceptions of people who have seen me grow and go through some of the most troubling times of my life thus far: times where I wanted to share my new experiences with my best friends. I chose not too because my floor mates saw it as being automatically unaccepting of new friends. Â
Sure, I’ve made lasting friendships in university, but those don’t rank above or below ones I made with my high school best friends. Like Mindy Kaling said, best friends are a tier, not a single person.
There were, of course, a few friends from high school with whom I grew apart, but with many I grew together into an even more diverse and cohesive core.
Every reunion, we notice subtle changes in each other and it was just a change in environment that needed to happen in order for us to live our own truth – staying connected but each an individual.
Keep your poor memories and judgements on others’ abilities to move on from high school to yourself.
I had a wicked time in high school and a completely different (but equally wicked) time in university.