29 Jul 2019

I grew up in a small town, where everyone pretty much knows everyone. When I moved into high school, I started off already knowing everyone from primary school. So, halfway through Year 11 when I decided to move to a different high school, it was a pretty damn big change.

I had been hanging out with the same group of girls I was seven years old and besides the drama everyone goes through with their friends, we did a pretty solid job at sticking together.

We were popular, we got invited to all the parties, we were the ‘cool’ group. Being with the same group since I was seven also meant I didn’t really have a chance to grow as a person, experiment without being judged, or really change at all from who I was when I first started hanging out with these girls.

When I first decided to move, my friends and myself were all certain that we would stay in touch, just as close as if I had never left.

Shocker, within about a month, I was barely on talking terms with any of them. Boyfriends, school, bitchiness and everything else got in the way.

 

So, when I moved to my new high school, I quickly realised that I’m crap at making friends. Like, really, really, terrible. I’d never had to learn how to do it before and turns out it’s a lot harder than I thought. 

I still tried to make the effort and eventually there were girls who tolerated me sitting with them. But I could only pretend it was all going great when somebody asked me how I liked it at my new school.

After summer holidays, the game was over. I didn’t see a single friend all summer holidays, my mental health was at an all-time low and I hated going to school.

I was getting lower marks than I’d ever gotten and I was pretty much just a hot mess. I went from being in the popular group who was never caught dead walking to class on my own, to the kid who sits awkwardly in the corner of the common room pretending to reply to messages they aren’t getting.

And then after a while, I just stopped caring. I started to realise that it was actually okay to walk to class on my own and that it was okay I didn’t talk to any of my old friends.

I had left for a reason and I needed to remember all the stuff I hated about having friends. The pressure to go out drinking every weekend when I just wanted to be in bed watching Netflix by 8pm, the constant drama and gossip and all the negativity that came along with it.

I’m not saying that I don’t miss having friends, but I’m lucky in the fact that I have a great boyfriend, I’ve always had a weirdly good relationship with my mum and I’ve always been a pretty independent person.

Moving schools taught me that high school isn’t your life. I never believed that when you leave school you would lose contact with most of your friends, but there’s some truth to it.

There are so many people who would’ve felt the exact same as me, but high school just seems to place you with a group of people and a lot of the time that’s where you’re stuck until you finish your final year.

Being a loner is possibly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I’ve learned to be okay and comfortable with who I am.

Now, I am half-way through my final year and I know that once these next couple of months are up, it’s not going to be the end of the world. It’s the chance to go off on my own and break free from the box I've been in all through high school, make stupid mistakes and actually learn who I am when I'm on my own.

Written by Matilda Phillips