Yes, I lived in Jappaqua: the town where students attended the top-ranked Horace Greeley High School and had it’s fair share of wealthy, white, Jewish families whose parents sacrificed just about anything in their children to have a successful future.

You may think that it’s great that there was such a focus on getting a strong education, and in reality, it probably pushed me to become a more focused student who was able to get into the perfect college for me, but there is definitely a slew of drawbacks that accompanied it.

This is where the name Jappaqua comes in. If you’re still wondering what a "JAP" is, it’s common knowledge that it’s an acronym for Jewish American Princess. If this isn’t clear enough already, it fostered materialism and/or competition with just about anything. More often than not, the way people got to the top was by cheating, manipulating, lying, and/or faking their way up either the social or academic ladder. Welcome to Chappaqua!

So, this is where I grew up. It was the norm to impress your peers with wearing the latest clothing trends, owning the latest technology, and having daddy hook you up with an impressive internship to put on your resume for college. Having second thoughts about whether this is a good town to grow up in yet?

I never did. High school was always a place that I dreaded going to. In my mind, it will always be associated with girls ignoring me after I did something that annoyed them the weekend before, people that constantly corrected me with every mistake I made, people that were always trying to find someone to pick on to make themselves feel better, people that I wanted to be friends with but felt I wasn’t popular enough for, boys that were full of themselves and took advantage of girls, people that would do anything to look cool and go to every party, and people that judged me if I didn’t get above an 85 on a test. Just thinking about it makes my head spin. It was a place where I had countless meltdowns in various bathrooms after a fight or a bad grade, a place that I felt I needed a ‘friend group’ in order to fit in, and a place where I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Every morning, I would self-consciously pull the door open and search frantically in the cafeteria, for my ‘friend group’ that was constantly changing from year to year just to have people to sit with and not get judged for sitting alone.

This ‘friend group’ of mine went behind my back countless times, making separate group chats without me, made weekend plans with other groups that seemed cooler than ours, and completely ostracized me when I dated someone my ‘friends’ didn’t want me to date; even my ‘best friend’ would roll her eyes when I said something at the lunch table. They thought I didn’t notice or didn’t care, but I did. Some friends, right? To put it lightly, it was hell. It hurt, really, really badly. I started to avoid talking to people that I considered my friends because I wanted them to continue liking me. I began coming home after school and just laying in bed, racking my brain why I wasn’t happy when everyone else around seemed to be. I would ask myself why wasn’t I good enough, why I didn’t look like her, why I wasn’t as naturally smart as him, why I couldn’t act as carefree as her, and why I cared so much about what everyone else thought. I look back on it now and I consider myself lucky that I managed to get through it all, even though I did have fits of depression and anxiety.

I never really found my true friends until my senior year. I held on to the idea that everything would get better after high school after I escaped the toxic environment of Chappaqua. In my head, I thought that this bubble that Chappaqua created wasn’t real life and that there are people who actually care about getting to know you and enjoy your company, rather than just look cool talking to you, and vice versa.

It may sound cheesy, but my life completely changed when I went to college. At Emory, things aren’t just better. This is the happiest I’ve been in a very, very long time. Things are academically stimulating, as they were at Greeley in Chappaqua, but not cutthroat and competitive to the point that I don’t want to go to talk to people in my class about an upcoming test. I don’t know what my friends get on papers and tests, and honestly, I don’t care. They don’t ask or care about what I got on my assignments, either.

I still have a social life, from clubs like MEDLIFE Emory, writing for various magazines, and my sorority. I’ve found that at college, people want to get to know you and people don’t care about social groups, even though there are people who have friends they are closest with. I was afraid to be myself, but my friends have definitely seen, and thankfully have embraced my weird, bubbly, sarcastic personality. After years of dealing with coming to school and being expected to sit with my ‘group’ that I didn’t even like every morning, I can now just let my guard down. It took time to adjust, and I didn’t realize how different it was right away. I came into myself slowly, and I grew up a crazy amount in one year of being at college compared to the amount of growth from my four years at high school. But I did it; I became a force. I’m not afraid to stop people that I know and talk to them. I’m not afraid to go places alone and be independent. Lastly, I’m not afraid to sit at a lunch table alone because it’s the norm here. If you asked my roommate how many times I’ve eaten at the cafeteria alone, she wouldn’t be able to give you an honest answer because she’s probably lost count.