We are meant to lose our high school friends
For many of us, graduating high school means falling into an unknown void. A place you’ve never been before, a naked independence, “the great unknown”, as Dylan said. For the first time, you have to be on your own and make choices on your own. Some of us go to college or university, some of us look for work, others might travel the world, and some of us are simply looking for ourselves.
But the one thing we all have in common is the fact that we’re all becoming new versions of ourselves. Discovering what it means to change and to exist amongst all the others who are changing as well. This is the void, the feeling of not fully knowing or understanding yourself, but also feeling such excitement at the fact that you get to reinvent yourself as a person. The joy of getting to know new people, expanding your knowledge, and mostly getting to know yourself all over again. It’s this scary and exciting tipping point that comes with turning into a so-called “adult”. And as a newly turned “adult”, you stand at a crossroads between freedom and responsibility. You are inexperienced and young enough to make mistakes — to be stupid and boundless and unbridled. But at the same time, a certain sense of responsibility still exists in your mind. And even though this piece is about high school friends, I urge you to always hold onto that kind of boundless freedom and not settle for the so-called socially accepted freedom deemed sufficient by society.
While this change means to flourish and to enjoy, it also means to lose and to grieve. Because change comes at the cost of leaving certain things behind in order to move forward. As you outgrow the teenage, high school version of yourself, you also outgrow certain interests and connections. In high school, you exist in a very concentrated bubble of people who share your interests, mentality, and experiences. You are a small part of a dynamic kept alive by the simple fact that you’re all at school together. This is not to say that these relationships only find their foundation in sharing the same space; it goes deeper than that. But, it has to be said that sharing this space, almost every day, years on end, simplifies keeping these relationships alive. You can genuinely love your high school friends and form deep connections based on shared interests, experiences, opinions, etc. But the fact is, keeping friendships requires work. While you’re in high school, the workload is lighter because you don’t have to make time for these friends you already see almost every day. But after graduating and settling into this new stage of life, it takes work to keep these specific friendships as deep and meaningful as before. You cannot expect the same kind of relationship once a crucial pillar is removed. But oftentimes, when you have distributed your efforts and energy across the different aspects of your life, there is simply nothing more to spare. And it doesn’t need to be ugly or angry; sometimes relationships dilute, and neither party intervenes to prevent it. Some friendships can no longer keep pace with the people we are becoming, and so, we slowly drift apart.
But in my opinion, we are meant to lose our high school friends. Not all of them, of course, some of my deepest connections are with those friends. But we are supposed to grow, and by always staying in the same circumstances, surrounding ourselves with the same people and opinions, we are limiting ourselves and preventing growth. We are stealing our own chance to become the person we are most proud of, and wouldn’t that be a shame?
Yet, I am the last to say that these losses don’t hurt. I myself have lost a fair share of my high school friends, and I grieved those relationships as if the people themselves had died. But that’s the thing, life didn’t end because we stopped talking, it just changed, not for the better, not for the worse, just, simple change. Healthy, normal change. Because at the end of the day, I feel that change is the price we pay for living, and grief is the price we pay for love. And some people are not meant to be loved for a long time; they are just meant to be loved deeply, for a short while.
