Based on the title of this article, I can take a wild guess at what everyone is thinking. That sounds kind of mean, huh? Shouldn’t I feel bad about not talking to the people who I basically grew up with? I mean, they were there for some of the “hardest” stages in my life, so it would make sense that I would want them to be there through this difficult period of growth, right? The answer to that is no.
For people who live in small towns, or go off to college with their best friends, they are more than likely have a different experience with this than I do, but as someone who has gone off to college across the country, where I knew virtually no one before school started, I personally don’t feel any obligation to talk to my peers from high school and/or middle school. I should mention that this does not come from a place of hate or anger, because for the most part, aside from feeling genuinely happy for everyone’s academic/employment success, I don’t feel much towards those that I knew in the past phases of my life. This is not to say that I don’t still talk to people that I knew in my “past life”, but rather that I simply don’t feel obligated to maintain friendships from high school, for the sake of memories.
Once you get to college, you start to realize that the people that you knew in high school and many of those friendships that you had were temporary. When everyone is together, going through the same dramatic high school situations, we start to believe that the people that we surround ourselves with are our true friends and we coax ourselves into believing that even once we part ways and go off to different colleges, we’ll still be able to maintain these friendships just as effortlessly as we did in high school. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t typically work that way. Sure, at graduation, you might make promises to be friends forever and to text or call one another every single day, but once you hit college, those everyday texts and phone calls start to happen less and less frequently. It’s not necessarily that either party stops caring, but rather sometimes you just become too busy trying to find yourself and figuring out your new life, and that’s completely okay. You’re not obligated to be friends with someone just because they were once a big part of your life.
College is all about developing new relationships and trying new things in an attempt to find your true authentic self. You meet a lot of new people who will change your perspective of the world as well as challenging you, and you start to establish deep connections that few people in high school are able to have. If you’re able to maintain a relationship with your high school friends while you’re in college, then that’s fantastic! Good for you! But for those of us who don’t really see the point in forcing ourselves to make these relationships happen, we don’t need to feel guilty for our own personal growth.
