When I was actually in high school a few years ago, I remember seeing the book 13 Reasons Why. I also remember skimming through the first and second page before putting it back down and thinking "oh great, someone is trying to encompass all of my teenage emotions into some cliche book", and so I never read the book. I didn't agree with someone blaming a bunch of people for their death, it felt selfish to even inquire about why she did this to them.

When I saw that the series was on Netflix and saw all of the feedback over the show, I can't lie and say I was ecstatic about it. Everyone was saying it was great, and my heart still felt the same. I did not want to watch this show, to see suicide trivialized or, to see feelings of young adults be made to seem shallow or dramatized.

But, because someone at the prestigious New York Times complained about just those things I started to feel a little different. All of the commentary below this one article was so adamantly certain that all of the ideas I had about the book and series, were false. Because the author of the New York Times article had been so stuck up about the feelings of teenagers as though they had never been one, I decided to give it a watch from an outside of high school perspective. Now that I knew it was possible to survive high school, revisiting the story seemed like it might be worth it.

One thing I did not want to happen while watching was to relive high school through a tv show, because high school isn't by any definition the greatest time of my life. I didn't know what Hannah had been through to make her feel this way, if her experiences had been equal or worse than mine. (It turned out they were much, much worse.) But, I knew what I was getting into when I started watching and that while watching I would probably think of at least one or two unpleasant memories from that time. I went to a high school about as big in student body size as Hannah's was, as the tapes/episodes went on I could remember incidences for almost everything that happened where something like that had happened. We were all just as dramatic, feeling like everything in high school was going to last forever. A lot of the things I saw tapered off into things I had heard about or seen even after high school, proving that it's not just high school students who feel this pain but, many young adults across the world. People don't lie when they say things get better after high school but, it's only because you are not in that socially poisonous environment all day long. There is still a long ways to go to make our young adults in this country feel comfortable. If older adults would learn to recognize that intervention into mental health of the teenagers they claim to be so dramatic was essential for them to be able to prosper outside of the doors of their high schools, this story would not resonate with so many teenagers and young adults in the world today.

High school socially, just does not prepare us to go out into the world as esteemed individuals who do not care what others think about us. In all honesty, it might just be the opposite. The show highlights that perfectly. The thing about this series that really struck a chord with me is that nobody flat out bullied Hannah. Nobody came up to her face every day and said things to her, tried to wear down her confidence as we see in so many movies about bullying. Everything was behind her back, or out of her control. Nobody wrote to her online to try to make her do what she did, but the technology still played a big role. Maybe that is what makes it hard for adults to grasp since technological advances since their high school days have made everything much more heightened. A lot of the people who were in the 13 reasons on tapes were people who she trusted, who she went to parties with and had crushes or romantic encounters with. Aside from the big moments that pushed her over the edge which was *spoiler alert* witnessing a sexual assault, taking the blame for a classmate's death and then actually being the victim of a sexual assault from the same perpetrator, the things Hannah went through were typical for this day and age. Social media plays a big role, a whole school can know or see something as they did in the show, in minutes.

Just because you as an adult did not experience the same kind of feelings as the teenagers in the series, does not give you the right to lessen the pivotal role it needs to play in the discussion between parent and child, student and teacher. So, this show turned into a phenomenon and is the new "trend" to watch. It will educate so many high school aged kids that their feelings and experiences are valid, which is going to better their compassion for those around them. Watching the series completely changed my mind about the book, and the story. It proves that we as a society need to change how we perceive others problems and how we react.