High school. As the general consensus goes, you either loved it or you hated it. I can count on one hand how many people I've met who have rated high school as an "eh, it was okay" kind of experience. It was either the best four years of your life, or the worst. We all have our different memories, and there doesn't have to be one blanketing opinion about the high school experience. That being said, for me high school happened to be the best times of my life.

I know that sounds sad, but it shouldn't. I'm a sophomore in college, and I can honestly tell you that college so far for me has been drastically underwhelming. I left home for the first time with a clear vision of what college would be. I saw myself making friends, spending my nights laughing with those friends and making lifelong memories. I thought I'd be studying things I was passionate about and learning every day. And then college started, and it just kind of kept going, and nothing ever really happened. I sort of made sort of friends, did well academically because of my lack of real friends, cried a lot because I missed home, and then decided that this school wasn't my place. I left, thinking that a new, fresh place with new opportunities and a few built-in friends would feel like home. It does feel like home, but a very empty home. A home that I can't seem to fill no matter how hard I try. A home that is full of so many opportunities that it sometimes feels like I'm drowning in them. College is great for a lot of reasons, but it just hasn't been the joyful experience people described to me, and I do very much miss high school at times. I'm not ashamed of that, it's just a fact.

All throughout my life, I've had tremendous difficulty making and keeping friends. Though I wouldn't have classified myself as friendless, I never was anyone's first choice to hang out with and I spent the majority of middle school alone. That all changed my first year of high school. Within the first few months, I connected with a group of people that literally changed my life. The five of us became absolutely inseparable, and some members of that group are still my best friends. For the first time in my life, I had a place and a group. I wasn't the kid that got shoved to the side of the walkway anymore, I was walking in the middle of my friends and laughing the whole way. Those people made my life happier than I could ever imagine, and I will forever treasure our memories together in those halls. Most of those memories, as a matter of fact, were made in extracurricular activities. We were all in band and choir, and words cannot describe how much I loved being a part of those programs. They let me explore who I was as a singer and a performer, gave me boundless opportunities to express myself, and gave me friends that felt like a true family.

High school was, in a word, simple. It was routine and bright and it made me feel like I had my life together. I knew who I was. I was the girl from that really loud group of band kids, the girl who got solos in show choir and who was voted "Best Laugh" her senior year because of that signature donkey bray sound she made when she was too happy to contain herself. I was the AP student who may have stressed over school, but knew what her ultimate goal was academically. I was the girl who got rejected from her first choice college, but still made it into the top 15 of her class. I was the girl with a great group of friends that just kept growing each year, the girl who always had someone to hang out with over the weekend, and who never partied but knew exactly what pure fun felt like from the times she was surrounded by those friends. I was a whole person, complete and flawed in many ways, but very conscious of who she was.

And then college came along. College came raging in with this need to instantly figure out what I was doing for the rest of my life. Suddenly I was less of a person and more of a scared child, less of an AP student with a 4.3 and more of a struggling college student with a strikingly average 3.25. College broke me down and messed me up in a way that should be considered inhumane, and though I've rebuilt myself, I have never found happiness like I had within the walls of that old ugly school back home. People I went to high school with are going to read this article and think I'm absolutely pathetic for missing that place, but I swear I'm not ashamed to wake up every other day with a dreadful urge to drive back and relive those days. They were good days, full of laughter and jokes, family and line dancing and endless music.

However, I'm not just sitting here typing out my sad life story just for people to sympathize or judge me. I have an actual point to make. That point is this: You are not your past. You are not the things that you were and you may never be those things again. You can only be who you are now and move forward towards who you're meant to be down the road. This is something I had to learn through a lot of trial and tribulation, that you just can't go back to something once it's gone. That's why even though college has been a little bit of a shit show for me so far, I keep pushing on. I keep trying to find where I belong here through trial and error and trial again. I keep trying because I know I eventually will find that happiness again, even if it takes me a few more years. I know that if I mope away these college years, they'll pass by just as fast as life always does and I'll be sitting somewhere with a diploma on my head wondering why I didn't just enjoy the things that were right in front of me.

So yes, I miss high school. I miss having a big enough group of friends to take up a whole sidewalk, I miss feeling a spotlight on my face and driving down the road late at night in the back of a beat up Pathfinder, jamming out to One Direction. I miss those times with all my heart, but I can't go back. Life only gives us two options, to stop or to move forward, there's no rewind button. I don't plan on stopping any time soon, no matter how much I want to. I'm not ashamed of loving the past, but I also have always been someone who loves looking forward to the future. So if you're reading this and you, like me, got completely beaten down by a circumstance in your life, keep on going. Keep your head up, walk straight forward and don't be afraid to look back every now and then at the road that got you to where you are.