Bowling For Soup made the understatement of the century with their cheeky 2006 hit, “High School Never Ends”, which declared in a line that rhymes with the spot-on title, “nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends.” As a hopeful seventeen/eighteen-year-old tossing your graduation cap up in the air without a care in the world, you probably imagined that you'd leave so many things behind when you ventured off into the "real world". And you did, indeed, leave a lot behind: braces, boyfriends, classes you hated, teachers you loved. But, as it turns out, high school actually is part of the "real world", and there are some things you started dealing with as a freshman that you'll continue to face as a working, full-functioning adult. Take, for example, these 10 things you thought you left behind in high school, but didn't:
1. Your acne
Don’t throw out the hoards of anti-acne creams, pills, and tiny, weird machines (like this thing) just yet! Stress breakouts, and breakouts in general, are real and they follow you into your twenties. There’s no hope of not getting carded at a bar or restaurant, (if you’re underage or not) because, unlike your fresh faced friends, your acne makes it look like you perpetually have an Algebra test to cram for before this week’s Friday Night Lights game.
2. Mean girls (and all other forms of self-entitled assholes)
While gossip-obsessed try-hards peak in high school, they don’t just die off when the rest of us start doing valuable things with our lives. Even though the specific mean girls you graduated with may not always be around to bully you, you can guarantee that other manipulative, vapid, self-absorbed degenerates (girls and guys alike) will cross paths with you in your adult life, and it will suck.
3. Your insecurities
For some reason, when your delusional young self imagined your older self, you always pictured someone confident and fearless, as if growing up automatically ensures these things. Turns out, you couldn't have been more wrong. While you're no longer so melodramatic about your flaws, you're still aware of them, and they're still relentlessly emphasized (by yourself and by others) from time to time.
4. Your uncanny ability to fall hard for f*ckboys
In high school, the guy you spent all of your time thinking about was on the football team, and the only time he ever texted you back was at 1AM on Saturday nights to ask, "Wyd", yet, somehow, you were smitten. The kinds of guys that you blindly gravitate towards now, that are the college equivalent of this, are, of course, the ever-priviledged, unapologetically sexist frat "bros", that will shot gun beers with you all night and then persuade you into sleeping over with lines like, "I hate sleeping alone." Beyond those guys, you have the assorted gym rat/pseudo-intellectual-who-thinks-he's-special-because-he-wears-a-man-bun/guy-holding-a-fish-in-one-of-his-Instagrams-that's-voting-for-Donald-Trump guys that you hook up with from time to time that dodge Snapchat story and tagged Instagram pictures with you because they don't want the 3-7 other girls they're hooking up with to know about you. You try to date nice guys, you really do.
5. Your sh*tty childhood friends
You swore you were "so done" with the people that your mom forced you into being friends with when you were younger once you left high school. And, for a while, avoiding the friends you spent all your summers with growing up seemed easy, as you all embarked on different paths post-graduation. But then you realized, hey, even though you wouldn't be friends with certain people if you met them as adults, you still share countless memories with them, and on the nights that all your adult friends are busy adulting, you can call up said childhood friends to grab half priced apps or beers with. (It beats downing apps and beers alone!)
6. Social media (ahem, Twitter and Facebook) drama
Being the subject of subtweets and Facebook rants happens to the best of us. What can you say? You live your life, and people gossip about it. It's inevitable. Not to mention the more refined arguments you get into over everything from Syrian refugees to breast feeding in public to the Black Lives Matter movement. Some people don't see it your way and never will, #suckstosuck .
7. Gym class
Granted, you no longer have that a**hole with a whistle and clipboard telling you that, no, seven push ups in one minute does not count for a passing grade, but even worse, you have the actual gym that you now have to pay actual money to go to on a daily basis. *Sigh* The people that exerted serious effort on the mile (haha, losers) in school turn into the people that run 10 miles in an hour on the treadmill; the athletes that gave you bruises from pegging dodge balls at you with unnecessary force are now the POS's that don't spot you properly when you lift. You still whine the entire time and everyone around you still silently judges.
Living under your parents' roof? You still have to take the trash out and follow a curfew. Haven't lived with your parents in 3+ years? You still listen when they tell you, for God's sake, to start going to church again, or drive your aunt who lives an hour and a half away to the doctor's. Remember the days when you were naive enough to believe "once I move out, I won't have to follow ANYONE'S rules"? Haha, ha. You were so funny.
9. Your ability to make a fool out of yourself (and generally make terrible decisions) while drunk
High school was the time when you were just learning how to drink. You had no idea that a mixed drink wasn't supposed to be 75% alcohol, and you could just barely sip a beer without gagging. Thus, when you got drunk, you made some bad calls: projectile vomiting in front of all your closest friends prom weekend, falling asleep somewhere grassy outside and waking up the next morning on your front lawn, having a 100 second Snapchat story where drunk you is singing so passionately off key it's like a pathetic, awful, private concert. You thought you'd be a little more refined after learning how to drink and learning from your mistakes. Unfortunately, drunk you at any age is an idiot with terrible ideas who can't sing.
10. The "old" you
You know, the dorky, hypersensitive version of yourself that laughs too loudly and stutters when she talks sometimes and can't go 12 hours without referencing Taylor Swift. You tried to kill her by losing weight, getting a haircut, and surrounding yourself with mature friends—but she's still in there (it's a part of you, after all) and comes out from time to time.
