The transition from high school to college can be difficult, especially as a freshman starting this new and completely different stage of life. Adapting to a different form of teaching while learning to live alone and trying to make new friends can be overwhelming.
All of that is common knowledge; I'm sure there are plenty of articles and videos out there telling you all about it. However, some people manage to make all of this process even harder for themselves by convincing themselves that the best part of their lives is behind them.
Movies sometimes show how the prom king and queen stay in their hometown, remain friends with the same people, and don't accomplish much after high school. Although this is obviously a generalization that does not apply to everyone, it reflects a common theme in real life: The people who "peaked" in high school will never have something like that again.
Now, I’m not saying that you will automatically have a bad time in college if you had a good high school experience. If, however, you enter college comparing everyone you meet with someone from back home and constantly reminiscing on how you sat with your group of friends at lunch making jokes about that one teacher who had no idea what they were doing, it will be much harder for you to appreciate what you have now.
It's easy to look back - to sit in your dorm room looking through pictures of when you and all your friends went to Johnny's house after school - and be sad about the fact that that part of your life is over.
It’s easy once you’re out of that situation to create an image of an ideal past in order to escape the stress of having to make new friends, study, cook, and figure out how long you can go without washing your sheets.
However, if you ask other people who were there too, they might assure you that it really wasn’t all that great. It was definitely fun, but probably not enough for you to convince yourself that was your peak. It's certainly no excuse for you to sit sulking in your room complaining about how you had more fun in high school than in college.
What’s worse is if you also managed to perform above average academically with minimal effort. Those who think they can do the same in college are sorely mistaken and tend to constantly complain about their grades and all the work they’re not even doing. They end up making the college experience worse for others, too.
Those who think they peaked in high school end up as sad young adults who don’t try and only know how to talk about how great their lives used to be, who then wonder why it’s hard for them to make friends… life has more in store for us. Life is more than what high school was.
