On my first day of high school, my mom picked me up, and I cried all the way home. That was just the beginning. No one bullied me and no one threatened me. That year, I spent most of my days the same way: I'd go home, lock myself in my room, and separate myself from anything that I felt could—or ultimately would—hurt me.
To anyone who has ever felt like high school wasn't for them, like you were doing the 'best years of your life' wrong: it doesn't stay that way.
The first two years of high school were a blur. I was new, but I knew a few people in my grade. For whatever reason, the girls I had wanted to be friends with didn't like me, and the guys subsequently followed. I spent weekends wondering why I wasn't at those parties with them, why it wasn't me. What killed me the most about it was I knew there was no reason for their distaste towards me. I knew if they had even tried to be friends with me, even for a second, I would have been at those very parties I so desperately wanted to attend. I spent those years sulking, watching my "End of High School" countdown melt away, one slow day at a time.
Sophomore year, everything changed. I had friends back home—kids I had grown up with. We were close, so it was hard being far away. One day, after what seemed like a perfect weekend with my old friends, they were discussing future plans, looking at concerts to go to, and restaurants to eat at. I smiled and sat in the corner, every once in a while adding that I hoped I could come, too. One of my friends whipped around, then, and said to me the one sentence that would change my perspective forever: "It's not us three and you, Frances. It's us four."
Something so simple and so straightforward made me realize that it was okay to not be best friends with the people in your high school, and that it was okay to not have a million friends. I stopped caring about what the people who didn't like me thought, and before I knew it, they were the ones asking me to go out with them. I, of course, denied. I had already molded into a schedule of going out with my home friends every weekend, doing things the kids in my school hadn't even thought of doing. I was free—free of every inhibition that had ever caused me to doubt myself or feel like I wasn't enough. Finally, I was happy.
Since then, I have found that whenever I am myself, I have a way with people. By my senior year, I was still not at those parties, although it was by choice. I was almost always invited, but I had no desire to go. I spend my days with my forever friends now, the friends that made me proud of who I am, the friends who made me invincible. And I found that even though I didn't see them every day, and even though we didn't go to school together, they made me happier than anyone in my high school ever could.
The thing about happiness is you have to go out and find it, and when you do, you know you did high school right.
