I returned to my high school track teams' meet the day after I returned home from my freshman year of college, and honestly, I had never felt so out of place in my entire life. I looked around to find familiar faces, and I found maybe ten people that I knew, but I was not close with them in high school. I stared around in disbelief to realize that I didn't know three full grades of students. I felt so old.
Four years I was there, and I thought I knew everyone. I went to a relatively small high school and graduated in a class of 225. As a senior, the younger students all looked up to you. But returning back a year later, no one knew who me or my friends were. The freshmen no longer wanted to be just like us because they didn't know us, and we didn't know them. It was a very weird feeling knowing that I had moved on from a place that I called home for four years.
Walking around I received hugs from the people that I had not seen since I had left, and they all asked me, "How's college?" or "Does senior year ever end?" I wanted to tell them never to rush their senior year because you will realize how much you miss it in just a few short months. They all told me what colleges they were attending next year and how they did in track this year. I just felt so out of the loop. I only graduated one year before, but I felt like I had been gone for years.
When you leave high school after graduation, you don't realize how much you will miss. Your friends will no longer text you asking you where you are because you are late or tweeting about the latest high school drama. You're going to go away to college and forget about your high school because you don't want to think about how they are doing without you. You're going to be focused on so many other things that are now your priorities in college. But trust me, that first visit back to your high school after a few months at college will hit you like a ton of bricks.
