After being in college for the past four years, I’ve learned that seeing my high school friends is one of the biggest reliefs. This feeling has nothing to do with the quality of my friends in college and has everything to do with the amount of stress we all put up with for nine months of the year. Honestly, seeing high school friends is just a nice break from being in college. Don't get me wrong, my college friends are some of the best people I've ever met, and they've kept me sane during some of my hardest moments, but my high school friends take me away from the pressure of being in school and the constant obsession with life after college.

When I'm around my college friends we are forced to reflect on our complicated college careers, at all times. We spend whole weekend nights laying on the floor with our books spread out in front of us, studying together, stressed about assignments, and still talking about classes, when we should be taking a break from it all to avoid our brains becoming a jumbled mess. I’ve tried to pinpoint why we put ourselves through all of this instead of just relaxing when we can. But the problem is that, as students, we are so focused on our courses and becoming successful while we are in school that we can’t get away from it. Our high school friends become our sanctuary away from having to think about all things career-related.

Now to be clear, my high school friends, of course, have the same end in sight for their college careers, meaning that we all want to be successful, but when we are together we can separate ourselves from this college world that we live 90 percent of our life in. I haven’t experienced their college moments personally like I have with my college friends, so we don’t need to dwell on the strain we feel during the school year when we finally see each other again. Yes, we talk on the phone and visit each other during the year, but in those minutes on the phone and days on each other’s campuses, we just live our lives simply, and carefree like we did in high school. There‘s no pressure or competition between us and we don’t need to force ourselves to worry about the hassle of life back at school or the anxiety that comes with the next starting semester.

My college friends and I feed off of each other’s determination in a way that doesn’t exist with my high school friends, but we also can’t stop talking about school or what we’re nervous about for the forthcoming months. Our lives together are much too real sometimes. I can push this aside when I'm with my high school friends. It's almost like they don’t exist in my professional life, and that's a good thing.

In fact, for some reason when I'm around high school friends, we almost never mention school aside from the unimportant, "How was your semester?" questioning. None of us want to ruin an evening with too deep of a conversation involving our past stresses. I think we can all agree that we get too much time for that during the semester, when the world slightly feels like it’s unraveling around us.

Although, if during the school year, stress really is eating away at me, I know that I can call any one of my high school friends and they will take me away from all of the heaviness that I’m feeling from classes. It’s not that we can’t talk about college life; it’s that we don’t necessarily want to. This leaves two support systems for when life becomes too tough.

Maybe this concept I’m discussing only applies to a few people, but I know there has to be some that relate to it. It’s possible that the ones this concept relates most closely to are the ever naïve "not ready to think about the future" type of people. Or we could all be pretty good at compartmentalizing our stresses so we can enjoy our life at least part of the time, meaning saving serious stuff for when college classes are in session.

I’ve never thought that I would consider myself the type of person that avoids conversations about the future. I used to always talk about my future with people, and maybe that was the problem. I had a set notion of how my life would pan out, and the thing is it almost never works out that way. I’ve changed my life’s path many times. After a while it becomes overwhelming to discuss it anymore than it needs to be, leaving the high school friends to not really have to deal with it.

The purpose of this article isn’t to make an argument for which friends are better, high school or college, because I don't think there could ever be a clear choice. This is a description of how these two groups of friends can differ, and how they differ in my own personal life. They are each important and completely crucial for various reasons, because each group and each individual friend brings something new to the life of a college student.