High school gave you more than just a diploma
Twitter feeds are fairly predictable. I use the word “fairly” loosely.
Most use their 140 characters to post about snow (their unworldly joy and excitement over it, or utter loathing), Christmas (the anticipation prior and the post-holiday nostalgia), their never-ending boredom (or how they’re curing it with Netflix and naps), and the ever famous “I hate everyone in this town”, how friendly.
Stepping into their college years, many develop the mindset that the past 18 years of their lives were pure and utter hell. They claim that every human in their hometown was likely the spawn of the devil, and how eternally gratefully they are to escape to a college campus. Yes, I’m sure your prom date, best friends, Kindergarten teacher and whole family all filled your life with devastation.
If your middle school and high school years were spent with friends who you won’t keep in touch with as the years pass, that’s a more understandable statement. I do pity you greatly, though. I think that high school friends are some of the most valuable.
We’re constantly growing and maturing as people, but one’s greatest growth can be traced back to high school. The transformation a person makes from a timid, helpless freshman, to a fearless senior, prepared to take on the world, is massive. High school friends are the people who aided in this change.
They stuck with you through your braces phase, or that bad haircut. They never gave up on you, even when you neglected them for the guy that you were certain was the love of your life. They helped you through your seemingly end of the world, high school catastrophes, like finding a homecoming date and pouring water down your throat during your first hangover.
They’re the people you can go to when college gets the best of you. When disaster strikes, they can give you an unbiased opinion and keep you sane from miles away. Post-finals, when you’re finally released from the stresses of school, they’ll drag you to your favorite hometown restaurant and reminisce on the dumb things you used to do.
If you’re lucky enough to attend the same college as friends from high school, I beg of you to never adapt the attitude that you have to ignore their existence in order to meet new friends at school. The college experience does involve meeting new people and not sticking solely to the people you knew and what’s comfortable, but that can happen while keeping your old relations. You’ll meet amazing people throughout your four years at a university, but few will know you as well as those who have been with you since the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with listening to the old cliché encouraging you to “make new friends, but keep the old”. A theory says that you meet your best friends in college, which is true, but they only add to the friends that high school gave you.
While home, before pretending that your high school years were spent with people who you consider only a step above scum, please introduce common sense to your thoughts. They were the people next to you during Friday night football games, school dances, basement parties when someone's parents left for the weekend, snow days and high school shenanigans. They voted for you for mock elections, decorated your locker on your birthday and made those seven-hour school days a little easier to survive.
If all of this hasn’t convinced you, remember that they didn’t leave you when you went through an UGG's phase. You owe them.
