In my personal experience weighing out whether to transition or to stop my high school friendships once in college was no challenge at all. I understand that for many of you who are also in college this may not have been the case. I could imagine that many of you could or at one point never stand the idea of leaving your best friend since day one of school behind. Some of you may have even gone to the same college as your best friend or became roommates. Others of you on the flipside felt like “whatever will be” and let the relationship become what it was meant to be. Others of you may have said to yourself “high school is done and I am ready to put all of that behind me” stopping your relationships with your friends completely.
When the time comes to transition from high school into college or university the question that crosses many of our minds is “what becomes of my relationships with my friends?” Do I do everything in my power to keep them? Do I transition and see what becomes of them? Or do I simply walk away and see what the future has in store for me?
Speaking from personal opinion, my freshmen year of college I allowed myself to transition. I stayed in contact with my high school friends but limited my time spent with them. I respected the fact they were growing and expanding their lives with work and school just as I was. I knew in college I would be forming new relationships with people that would help me grow as a person as well. With that, I figured whoever I was to grow apart from would and whoever was to stay would. Just that happened. Many of my closest high school friends simply disappeared from my life and the ones that stayed grew closer.
Now, this was not a particularly hard concept for me, because I switched high schools partially through my junior year. The people I once called friends continued to grow into their lives and pushed me to the side. I mean nothing wrong by this just simply that we grew apart when our paths changed drastically from one another. So when graduation came and some of my friends were afraid to lose one another, I simply accepted the fact that whatever will be will be. The ambitious and free person that I am, wanted everything to just transition, not stop but transform.
For some of you that are reading this, you may find or have found that cutting ties with high school friends was fine and efficient on your end. That’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with that. You do you. But I will say that there is no way that we don’t just simply transition or transform these relationships even just a little bit.
I feel most of us can’t honestly just decide right away to end our friendships we need to see how everything goes first. Most importantly we need time. It still took time for me to end friendships with people from my first high school. I didn’t simply say to myself “well I’m not going to be a friend to them anymore.” That would be silly and utterly ridiculous. I hadn’t even established a life in my new town and school, so how was I even going to consider cutting my connection with them. The same goes for college. If you don’t have anything established when you first start college how can you honestly end any connection with anybody. In my opinion, it would be hard to function in your new stage of life if you didn’t have someone that was already close to you.
I get that many of you reading this have already been through this and are enjoying your time here at UWM and wondering what is the point of this article. Well, I believe that this is a lifelong practice we all come across throughout the life cycle. Even in college, there are friends that I used to be much closer to that I am not as close to anymore. I’m certain that many of the friends I will make throughout the rest of my college career and life as an adult will transform. I’m sure the same will apply for you.