When you get to college, at first, you’ll keep your highschool friends close. Over time, however, they may start to slip away as you meet more and more people. For me, in a turn of events, I’ve managed to become even better friends with some people I’ve known through high school as each year passes by since I graduated.
Sure, some have slipped away and when you go home it’s not so much as hanging out as catching up with each other. There’s definitely some friends I have that we’ve only really spoken upon my twice a year return to my hometown. Other friends, I’ve managed to keep up with despite myself. If you polled any of my college friends, you’ll find that I’m absolutely terrible at keeping up with my phone so it’s a miracle in itself that I’ve even been able to keep any friends whatsoever.
If you get lucky, like I have, you’ll have some friends from high school that go to the same college as you do. When I moved to Orlando, I moved from a small town in northwest Florida called Pace. It’s OK if you’ve never heard of it, it’s close to Pensacola, and about 200 miles west of Tallahassee, if that gives you a geographical standpoint. It’s approximately 500 miles away from Orlando and the drive is just awful, so you can imagine that I don’t make it home very often.
Incredibly, I had one friend from Pace that I didn’t know that well, who also moved to Orlando. From there our friendship really bloomed. College has a way of changing people, either for better or for worse. The distance that I had from my friends that either went to a different college or stayed home has only strengthened our friendship over time. We grow in different ways and catching up is a lot of fun with one another. In some aspects, I like them even better now than I did in high school, where I was keeping up in their everyday lives, rather than catching up on the past several months.
For those reading, I urge you to try your best to not leave people behind in the dust as you grow. It’s OK to grow in different ways, in fact I encourage it. If you left your hometown and moved 500 miles away and you’ve somehow not changed at all after a few years that would be strange indeed. You won’t return home exactly the same way that you left. Change is good, and in my experience I’ve found that change is exactly what helped save some of my friendships in the past.
You don’t want to be 21 years old and still have the mentality of a 17 year old in highschool. You’ll inevitably change, but that doesn’t necessarily have to translate to you leaving old friends behind. If you still want them in your life, despite growing in other ways, definitely keep up your best efforts to still be their friends.
You can never have too many friends, and keeping some of your high school friends if you can, is something I recommend. They grew up with you, they lived through a lot of the same things you did. In college, everyone comes from different backgrounds. Sometimes it’s just nice to have someone to be in solidarity with.
