High school was the four years where who your friends were, what activities you were in, and your GPA put you into a certain group or what most teenage movies would call a “clique.” These groups vary from your stereotypical nerd, jock, prep, loner, and all of the above. They were made to keep us divided but they also gave a sense of belonging in a new environment with people you’ve never talked to. For every freshman that enters, they search for the group that they will bond with and hopefully they will be happy with it for the next four years.

For me, I didn’t belong to one singular group, although most people would disagree. I hung out with people from each group, never giving my full attention to where I should sit during lunch. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t identified as just a band geek or a loner. This was difficult at times, having friends from each group that wouldn’t want to hang out with each other but I wanted them both to hang out with me, and it made my social time outside of school hard.

From hanging out with each group, I realized the double-standards that came with them. When I would hang out with an athlete, someone who is higher in the food chain, I noticed that they treated people differently when they were alone rather when they were with their friends. I had many times when I would love to hang out with this person and we got along well, but as soon as their friends showed up, they changed, and I didn’t want to be apart of that conversation anymore.

On the other side, when I would hang out with someone lower in the food chain, someone like an outsider, they would judge the way a popular kid was, but if that popular kid did the same thing to them, they got offended and defined all popular kids like them.

This is challenging because it puts a stigma around the way different social groups are and then they start to come true. It’s no doubt that the popular kids run the school but not all of them are snobby. It’s no doubt that the loner probably doesn’t want to talk to you, but that doesn’t mean they are a weird person. The problem with high school is not only the division between us but also the need to change who we are in order to feel like we belong.

The best way to describe this in one of my favorite movies, The Breakfast Club. At the end of the movie, when they have all been through this detention together and they sit on the floor talking, they are all the same. None of them are better than the other in the library, but once they go back to school on Monday, they will be divided again and they won’t speak to each other.

This may seem like a defeat, that we will always have this division, but there is so much more than just our groups. High school may put boundaries on the way we should act and whether or not we will be considered more worthy because of where we stand, but, in the end, we are all the same.