Ah, high school. Four walls filled with judgement, peer pressure and cliques upon cliques. It is human nature to want to be accepted and to want to be part of the cool crowd. I’d be lying to you if I said there were times that I didn’t want to be part of them. That may be due to the fact I kind of expected high school to be like "High School Musical," even just a little bit. Boy, was that a real let down. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. High school is all about finding out who you are and what interests you, not what everyone else is interested in. You need to look past the sleeveless cutoff shirts and the Louis Vuitton handbags long enough to realize that being cool in high school really doesn’t matter, and here’s why.
High school is only four short years of our lives. It’s a little pinpoint on the timeline that is our life quite frankly. So who decided that the amount of Instagram followers and designer clothes a person has is more important than the very reason that we’re actually in school -- to learn. Once we graduate, that it’s. How popular you were or how many parties you went all become completely irrelevant statistics and we're forced to face college on our own. You’re no longer going to have this reputation of being a party animal when you enter college. Cliques are inevitable, but once you can pull yourself away from the magnet that is being popular and find a solid group of friends, who you know will always have your back in any situation, your high school career will become so much more enjoyable.
There have been plenty of Monday mornings where I arrived at school and heard about this amazing party that everyone went with Snapchat stories documenting the entire night. Let it go. The sooner you learn not to care, the better of you will be. I promise. It will not matter later in life how many parties you went to, or how many boyfriends or girlfriends you had. What will matter is how hard you worked so that you can go to a reputable college and earn yourself a degree! There will be plenty of time to go out and wake up in your friend's dorm not remembering what happened the night before in college. But for now, focus on your grades. Trust me, it’s worth it in the end. So while my fellow classmates were busy trying to remember the amount of shots they threw back on Friday nights, I was busy hitting the books. Work hard, and it will pay off for you later in life. Slack off, and it just might come back to bite you in the butt.
As a current high school junior, these are all lessons I wish somebody had told me as a freshman. However, looking back, I wouldn’t trade my current high school experience for anything. If there’s one thing that I want people to know is that being cool in high school doesn’t matter because good grades are always better than Sunday morning hangovers.
