College is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and entering new horizons. A lot of times, you find yourself exploring those horizons alone. You spend four years trying to find the best of friends in high school, but then you’re ripped apart from them to go your separate ways. Sometimes that ripping can feel like you’re losing your other half. Sometimes, that ripping can happen before your first day of college classes has even begun. It is usually necessary to cut some ties with past friends to make room for new ones and it isn’t ever easy. But don’t worry, we’ve all been there as well. It isn’t easy for anyone. Keep reading for some helpful insights as to how you should deal with inevitably losing your high school friends in college.
A lot of people fall into situational friendships in high school. We’re friends with people because we have the same math class together or you sit by them every day at lunch. We don’t always form friendships because we like the same things. Sometimes, we form those friendships because they’re convenient and we don’t know anything different.
So now, high school is over. You’ve obtained your diploma, thrown your cap in the air, and taken the obligatory pictures where mascara is running down your cheeks, which all means you’ve officially graduated. While no longer taking math classes you hate or science classes you don’t understand is thrilling, what happens to those friendships that were based off of everyday connections? Sometimes- often- they fizzle away, and it’s never easy.
The fizzling away begins slowly. First the group text dwindles down, then you’re only talking to share a funny article or picture, and you’re only seeing each other at the grad parties of your mutual friends. Before you know it, everything just stops all together and you wonder what went wrong? How did your best friends become nothing but acquaintances you have some photos with in the yearbook? It was a slow, and honestly quite painful, unspoken goodbye. There were no fights or dramatic goodbyes.
The same goes with friends. In her debut novel Girl Online, Zoe Sugg writes, “I wondered if sometimes our friendships are a bit like clothes and when they start to feel uncomfortable it’s not because we’ve done anything wrong. It just means that we’ve outgrown them.” You can’t keep your favorite dress from your fifth grade graduation and expect it to fit at your high school one. Just like clothes, sometimes you just grow out of people. It doesn’t mean the memories you made with them are bad or have to go away; it just means that it’s time to move on and make some new ones.
So what do you do now? You’re entering college all alone and you feel like all hope is lost because your phone doesn’t light up with #squad’s group chat notifications anymore. My tips for you are simple.
Everyone says it, but I’ve heard it works wonders. Play some of your favorite music and hope a stranger down the hall likes it too.
Go out to the activity fair and join all the clubs that interest you- literally all of them. Go to every meeting and turn down the ones you don’t like later. You’ll find your passions and then you’ll find people who share them with you. You’ll get away from the situational friendships and find the ones rooted in common interests.
The most important tip is to never pretend to be someone you’re not. Often times, the relationships we make in college truly are the ones that last. You can’t form a life-long friendship based off of a lie or you are just inaccurately representing yourself. Now is the time for you to embrace who you are and look forward to meeting people who can embrace who that is too.
It’s okay that some high school friendships don’t last. Just because you don’t talk every day doesn’t mean that you can’t like their photos on Instagram or that you have to unfriend them on Facebook.
Don’t be afraid to hang onto the last, smallest, thread of your friendship. Nothing will ever be the same as your lunch booth conversations in the cafeteria during senior year, but that doesn’t mean you have to forget the friendships happened at all.
Just don’t let the last thread yank so tightly that it’s holding you back from tying knots of friendship that are surely still to come.
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