Lesson 1: What they try to tell you about the next four years of your life

High school is a very intimidating thought as an eighth grader. When you try and picture your life for the next four years, you look at the people who surround you in that moment and truly believe with all your heart that these will be YOUR people throughout high school. Oh boy, how we were juvenile. These four years change you and the people you always thought you would surround yourself with. Change may even be the wrong word but you understand. You know how your friends slowly slipped through your fingers and how you lost those little pieces of yourself along the way. We were all warned, our older siblings, our parents and our family friends all told us that life would change and our friends wouldn’t be the same when we graduated high school. It’s safe to say, I think for most of us, that we just looked at them and nodded because on the inside we reminded ourselves that our group of friends were inseparable. Yet sitting here today and reflecting on last four years of this life I’d have to say that all of them were right.

Being a young teenager it is easy to take your friendships for granted before life hits you in the gut at full force. It is easy to see your friends every day and not reflect on how much these people actually mean to you. The first months of high school usually go pretty smoothly until, she meets that boy. Oh and this boy is older, a junior maybe, he is cute and his friends are the life of the party. This is when you and all of your girls are introduced to a new and very different environment, the one that you watched in the movies before high school began. This is when you are introduced to drugs, sex, and alcohol. Still as a young girl these things are scary and it’s hard to understand why people say these activities, so to speak, are such “a good time”. Once you and your friends experiment with this “good time” you gradually start to see the new person some of your ‘so-called’ lifelong best friends were becoming. Although you may not have realized it then, looking back now and being honest with yourself, you changed too whether it was in regards of your feelings toward someone else or maybe just as a person as a whole.

As graduation rounds the corner, it is really taking a toll on me that I walk the halls with people I used to know like the back of my hand. I pass people, look them in the eyes and act as though I haven’t known them a day in my life. Maybe these friendships just weren’t meant to be, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t try hard enough to just be a good friend.

A good friend; the one who stays for the break-ups, the family feuds, the failed jobs and so much more. This is the hardest relationship to watch fall apart. The saddest most heartbreaking act to be a part of. After making it through almost all of high school you think that they really will be there for life. Your best friend, your rock for the past four years is changing and yet again because of that boy. Oh and this boy is older, in college, he is cute and his friends are the life of the party. Not much has changed there, am I right? But this hurts much much more because you have made it through the storm with your best friend and you guys are so close to the end. This boy and her start spending more and more time together and you watch them grow so close. Then the jealousy sets in, not in the same way you feel over a guy, but because you know your time is being robbed from your best friend for a stupid boy.

You realize the moments of high school define you as a young person and you look around and to find yourself surrounded with only a couple of friends that know you inside out. You start to think that college cannot come soon enough. You beg silently for your relationships with friends to be as simple as they were those first couple of months in high school. You try your hardest to just hold on to the last person you know to be your true friend, but you see them slowly slipping away. These are the things we thought could never happen, these are the things they tried to tell us about.