During a recent bout of Insta-stalking, the tap-after-tap rabbit hole brought me to a picture of one of my high school classmates at graduation, with a caption thanking our alma mater for giving him the best four years of his life. No offense, but I literally thank God I am not one of those people. This isn't to interpret that the aforementioned classmate meant that the rest of his life is bound to be following a downward trend going forward, but it's just an example. Some people *actually* reach adulthood (you know, like full-on adulthood) and look back on high school as the best part of their lives, and that just really depresses me.

High-school for me was, objectively speaking, fine. A brief glance at my four years would reveal that I was extremely involved in extra-curricular activities, played sports, took only Honors/AP classes, etc. From a generalized perspective, I should be very grateful. I know that some people don't even have the opportunity to attend school, so I will never take the academic aspect of my education for granted. It's all the stuff that ultimately comes with attending a school...or work...or participating in life in general- my peers.

The popular kids at my school (popularity is a construct, blah, blah, blah, and all that jazz- but for the sake of brevity, we will just call them the people that no one at my school really liked, but pretended to anyway for reasons unbeknownst to me) fairly harmless. Most of them, at least. They didn't trip kids at lunch or call them expletives or anything; they were just painfully obnoxious. I just really will never understand why underage individuals think that getting drunk is the coolest thing in the world, or why they believe that anyone else cares about who passed out next to who, or said what, during their period of intoxication, but this seemed to be the favorite pass time of my peers. Getting drunk is A) entirely overrated, and B) not an interesting, or engaging topic of conversation.

I am from Knoxville, TN, which is where the University of Tennessee is located, and also where most of my friends attend school. And I will go ahead and explain to readers who are not familiar with living in a college town, but high schoolers also think that going to frat parties is the end all, be all of bad-ass behavior. So that was also a whole thing...who was dating who from the previous years graduating class, whose dorm someone passed out in...all these fill in the blank scenarios that constituted overheard conversations.

Within this circle of human beings, there was also a group of boys who all went to the same church and had been really close friends since we had been in elementary school, and those were the really harmful people. The people who shouted at me to get out of the first row at football games, or made fun of Student Government, or basically just made me feel like nothing I ever did mattered. It's not important enough to recount, but it caused me a lot of trauma; crying in my room every night for a month kind of trauma.

I'm over it now, but my advice to anyone still in high school with a similar experience is that do not ever let yourself believe that high school is as good as it gets. I live on my own now, and have no one to impress or to fit in with, and it's seriously the best thing that's ever happened to me.