To the girls who can only ‘play’ nice…

If college has taught me just one thing, it’s that no one gives a damn about you. Sorry mom and dad, but that is probably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned here, and it’s only been 4 months.

They say college is the best four years of your life, and many people will tell you to stay in as long as you can, but why is it so great? It’s definitely not 'cause of the food, I can tell you that. Maybe the parties, or the fact that there’s really no rules, but there’s one thing even greater:

No one cares who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’re from if you were the high school homecoming queen four years in a row or just a number in a class graduation - people don’t care. When you come to college, you get the chance to re-create yourself if you really want. But, honestly, you don’t have to. The best part is that there’s a fresh set of eyes; there are new people who don’t know about your past; you can tell them all the details you want to include, and leave out the parts you don’t. You get to choose what people know you for.

That’s not to say you don’t tell them anything about yourself, or that you lie because let’s be honest, that’s not the best way to start off an honest friendship. You can share your best moments and even some of your worst, but still, you get to decide which stories are just a little too embarrassing to tell.

Even better, though, high school is in your rear-view, or at least you would hope so. While some people haven’t realized, you’re gone and moved on, you yourself have, and all those ‘mean girls’ become irrelevant to you. That’s not to say their words can’t hurt, but in the grand scheme of things, why do they even matter? The answer: they don’t.

Girls will always talk about you, that’s for sure, but as you get farther and farther away, their words don’t seem to strike you so hard. They may have when you were a struggling 17-year-old trying to be noticed, but now they’re just one page in your textbook.

College helps you realize that if people don’t care about you, they will ignore you. As alienated as that may sound, it’s the best thing that’s happened to me here. There’s no more fake friends, false gossip, and terrifying rumors, people in college are real with you, whether they like you or not.

Although you’re no longer home, don’t get me wrong, you can’t escape too easily. For some reason, people still care what you do. They keep up with your latest hairstyle, weight-gain, relationship status, and new social life, but why? That’s the one thing I’ve yet to figure out.

My mom’s token line is, “honey they’re just jealous, that’s all,” but is that really it? High school girls simply don’t know how to be kind anymore. They prey off the failure of their peers and poke fun at just about anything they can, whether it’s due to their own insecurities, or they simply don’t know what it’s like to be a kind-hearted person, that’s just how it is. They aren’t genuine, they aren’t truthful, and they sure as hell are not trustworthy.

What they don’t realize is that once you leave high school, whether you were the cool kid or the geek, even your classmates don’t care what you do after you’re gone. While you may have used to care what the ‘populars’ thought of you, it doesn’t matter once you get to college. No one asks you how many proms you went to, or the number of boyfriends you once had, they get to know you for your ‘new’ self and then make their own judgments about who you are as a person.

There’s no predisposed information about you unless you decide to follow half your town to college (then there’s a little), but for the most part, you get to make your own impression without people having judged you for what they’ve heard.

My personal favorite, though: there’s no ‘status’ in college. There’s simply too many people to pick who’s the ‘coolest,’ so your friends are your real friends. It’s been a short four months here and I can tell you that I have found more genuine, inspiring, and true friends that I know I will have for a long time, and I can’t always say that about home. There are simply not enough kind people in this world, but they are out there, so sometimes you just have to leave to find them.

Unfortunately, as much as I can stress that, things will never change. Girls will be girls, they’ll act like they like you and turn around and talk about you to someone else, that’s the way life is. My message is really to those who’ve been hurt by these people: smile today, because even if you’re life feels like hell right now, just remember within the next few years, you’ll be thriving, and they’ll be worried about what dress they’re going to wear to your high school reunion.