High school is something that everyone goes through, whether they make it out alive or not. It can be the best four years of your life or nothing less of miserable. For each person, it’s a completely different experience. What you do during high school could determine the person you become. My experience was much different than others I spoke to, not because we took different classes and had different teachers, but that we had different friends and participated in different activities. You learn more in high school than just academic things.

Girls are mean, boys are mean, and you have to choose your friends wisely. Usually the ones you enter high school with are not the ones hugging you at graduation. That, I’ve learned, could be a good thing or a bad thing. It shows that either you changed to be better than what you were before or you have failed to grow and mature with the rest of your group.

My mother once told me that when one of her friends would go through a break up everyone would cry together on the bathroom floor till that friend felt better. I remember thinking that would be great; to have friends that cared so much about you to drop everything and make you feel better.

High school graduates reminisce on their time at Hobbton, and they say that leaving was the hardest thing to do. It made me wonder what I was missing out on. How could anyone miss a place filled with drama, tears, arguments, stress, headaches, and heartaches? Now that I am a senior, I completely understand what they meant. I am facing leaving all the people who have surrounded me all my life, the people who made me who I am today.

No, I will never miss the sleepless nights I will never get back, the rude comments people make as they pass you in the hallway, and the nervous feeling you got when you walked into school in that new outfit quietly praying people won’t rip your self esteem to shreds. High school was a mental game, one big obstacle after another.

Even though I would never want to relive these past 4 years I’m glad they happened. If it weren’t for high school I would have never realized that I could become so interested in so many different things. I would have never escaped the trap of a shyness that had confined me all my life.