Do you know what it's like to enter your freshman year of high school with absolutely no friends at all? It's awful. Everyone is insecure and trying to find themselves freshman year, but entering with no friends makes it that much harder. Stories of people who moved right before high school surround teenagers, but no one ever hears about the inverse: the friend who was left behind.
The summer before freshman year, all three of my best friends moved in some way or another. The girl I'd known since I was born moved literally to the other side of the world when her family became missionaries in Taiwan. My best friend of eight years moved 1,150 miles to southern Florida. After my friend's mother passed, she started at a private school over an hour away from me. While I can't ignore how hard it was for all of them to move away and make their own friends, going back to the same group of people you've gone to school with your whole life isn't easy. It doesn't hit you until your first day back when you walk in and realize that you don't know where to go wait. You have no one to talk to between (or in) classes. Although you know everyone you're around, when you haven't been close to them, you feel like you're walking into a room of strangers, except these strangers have seen you grown up. They've seen you cry in class when you got too frustrated to think. They've seen your awkward fashion phases. They've seen you grow close to a group that is no longer there with you. Here's the thing though: it's not just awkward for you; its awkward for them. They're not used to seeing you without your "squad". As weird as it seems, they don't know how to treat you when you're by yourself. Soon you become in a situation where you're surrounded by people you know, but you're sitting alone among strangers. Because of this, I became an anxiety-filled 14 year old. I would cry as I got ready to go to my home school group, and I would have panic attacks if anything put me off schedule. After having a panic attack where I was too dizzy to stand and was barely breathing, I knew I had to do something about it. For me, part of that healing/growing process involved switching home school groups. My junior year became a fresh start. I became better friends with people I had met through volleyball and made new friends as well. It was a hard process that involved a lot of anxiety, tears, and prayers, but by the end of my senior year, I was no longer the depressed emotional wreck of a freshman that I had started those four years as.
So dear friend who was left behind,
I know it feels like the end of the world, but if you put yourself out there, you will find there are friends in familiar places if you seek them out.
Signed,
The Girl Who Was Left Behind
