Picture this: you just got home from your summer internship and as you're sitting on the couch catching up on all of your social media for the day, you see that another girl you went to high school with is pregnant with her second kid! You may have only tangentially known this girl, but you immediately screenshot the post and send it to your group chat of your friends from home.
The conversation probably looks something like this:
You: (insert girl's name here) is pregnant!! Again!
Friend A: Whatt?!? Dude. I didn't even know she had a kid before.
Friend B: I just saw this too! Crazy!! I can barely keep my cactus alive, so kids definitely won't be on my radar anytime soon.
Friend A: Relatable. I honestly can't imagine.
Sound familiar?
So many of us do this, and even if not with malicious intent, we often don't realize that what may come as shocking or irresponsible in our eyes may be a perfectly normal and responsible life choice for someone else. Most of us are in college and are surrounded by, you guessed it — people that are also in college. This may be the path that the majority of us are on, but it is not the path that everyone takes, and we should be able to respect that.
Just because you are working towards becoming an engineer, doctor or lawyer doesn't mean that you are better than the person who chose to enter the workforce after high school or the person who chose to start a family early.
If you think about all the different choices and circumstances that landed you where you are today, you'll begin to realize how many different paths you could've taken. Hopefully you can look back and be happy with the path you chose, but more importantly, you should be able to notice that the choices you made to get there may not have been the choices that would have been best for a different person in different circumstances.
So, is it okay to send that screenshot to your friends back home? Sure! It's always fun to keep track of what people from your high school are up to and to reminisce with your old friends. We just need to be careful not to judge those who are on different paths, no matter how much they differ from our own.
Life is full of choices, and, at the end of the day, the only choices we can judge are our own. You often don't know the entire story when it's someone you know, much less when it's just some girl you went to high school with.