In an earlier post, I started talking about a painful memory with classmates I had been friends with in high school. Now, I am going to actually delve into the story and tell you how I went through some serious loss, but through that experience of loss, I found things.
Like I had talked about in my earlier post, I was very close with six classmates and we did almost everything together. I was excited to have such a tight knit group and was feeling pretty optimistic about my high school experience. Every high school freshman walks into their first day half wondering if it is going to be at all like the movies. You know those movies, where you make your best friends for life and find your future husband, the man you marry and then tell your kids how you were high school sweethearts. I blame Hollywood for skewing all sense of reality about high school. Those movies are not true.
I found out this harsh fact the hard way. My sophomore year started off well. My six friends at the time and I would celebrate birthdays together, hang out at lunch, and go into New York City for shopping trips. It was wonderful. Somehow, everything took a turn for the worst in February. I don’t know which hurt more, the fact that they felt done with me or that they decided this just before my 16th birthday. Needless to say, being friendless and lonely on what is considered a milestone birthday feels pretty rotten. This was when I found out the harsh reality that people who you expect to be your close friends might not be.
A disclaimer as I talk about this: I don’t want to scare kids starting high school. Not every experience is equally horrible. For a large majority of my grade I graduated with, they are still very close. When I look back on the experience as a whole, I am thankful to the six “friends” for helping me open my eyes and move out of my comfort zone. When you end up without a solid group of people to hang out with, you need to become more social. Thanks to the incident, I became more comfortable in my own skin, was more outgoing to people in the grade and by my senior year I had one or two very good friends but was friendly with everyone.
My sophomore year helped me find out a little bit of myself and I started to become the person I am today that I really like. As I break the story here, the rest will be in a third post, my hope and message I want to get across to anyone who had or is experiencing a similar situation is to keep your head up and learn from it. I am a strong believer in taking every life experience, finding the silver lining or the teaching moment and go with it. I don’t view these instances as things that hold me back anymore, I view them as ways for me to grow as a person.
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have you ever considered the reason why those friends stopped being your friend? I would love to see you talk about why you guys stopped being friends and what may have led up to it
[…] In two earlier posts I talked about struggling with relationships in high school. While this will be the final post in the series, I don’t think it will be the last I talk about this topic. Thinking about it raised more thoughts, questions and reflections I feel are important topics to write about. In the meantime, I want to finish my shortened saga and share what I took away from it. […]