01 May 2021

Finishing high school is pretty damn exciting. Especially that period when you’re doing absolutely nothing with your friends besides kickin’ back for a couple of months after completing your final exams.

You make some pretty incredible memories in your teenage years with your mates and do some crazy stuff that you’ll look back on and think how stupid you really were.

You think that you and your mates are going to be friends forever and nothing will tear you apart.

Unfortunately, you’ll soon come to realise that people change and, a lot of the time, you're not going to hang out with your mates in the same way you did in high school. Especially if they all go to uni.

My friends and I enrolled in the same university but in different degrees. We all attended the orientation day together, did a campus tour and ran around during O-Week, grabbing as many freebies as we could get our grubby little hands on; we left feeling pretty chuffed that we were about to start a new part of our lives, and we got to stick together. 

But, as classes started up and assignment due dates started looming, I felt a weird disconnect from my friends.

Your friends are all busy and that sucks.

I tried to message the group chat to organise something with the entire gang, but everyone had something on. Someone had to work, another had a big assignment due and one said they had to catch up on lectures.

I 100% knew where they were coming from; I was drowning in my own course work, skipping lectures to catch up on work and pulling all-nighters to smash out assignments I'd left to the last minute.

Uni was tough but no one told me it would be this hard. I forced myself to be as social as I could be, so my mates and I could all escape our work for a couple of fun hours here and there.

As the semester dragged on, heaps of my friends started considering dropping out. A handful of them decided to stick it through, some of them ditched their degrees and started working full-time while some went travelling. And it was then that I realised that we were never going to go back to the way our friendships were in high school.

High school had secured us as friends. We all had the same classes, sat in the quad together at lunch and walked home from school. We had a comfortable routine that didn't need a lot of effort to maintain so when we were thrown into the real world and all our priorities changed, we had to learn how to be friends again.

It wasn't a case of relying on third-period Maths to hang out or swinging by after school. We had to decide that we were worth each others time and then find a way to make it work for everyone.

It meant I lost some friends. Some people are only friends of convenience and with high school long gone, so were they. It meant I drifted from others, those that had other priorities that trumped our friendship or wanted to focus on things like uni and work, and that's a-okay. Because others stuck around and they're the ones I knew were in it for the long haul. The ones that understood our schedules might not match up but making it work anyway. The ones that you can go for weeks or months without seeing but when you do finally catch up, you feel just as comfortable as ever. The ones that I knew I could message if I was having a tough time and would drop everything to make sure I was okay. The ones who would message before a big exam and wish me luck.

After high school, holding onto your friends is hard. Everyone is busy, everyone has a million things they need to do and no one has enough time to squeeze everything in. So, it's inevitable that you're going to lose some friends; to uni or to work or to an overseas adventure. But it's not such a bad thing and you shouldn't beat yourself up if your crew becomes a little bit smaller.