Working with high schoolers reminds me how much the drama that goes along with being that age can hurt. Recently we've been dealing with the idea of exclusion, as it happens often in high schoolers, but particularly the idea of kids getting abandoned by their friends. Now, while the cycling of friends is perfectly natural, as was pointed out by one of my co-workers, I can't help but be pulled back to being that age, and being that kid who got cycled out.

People can be unintentionally cruel. High school girls most of all, but teenagers in general. I realize that I've been out of my teens for less than a year, but I still feel that I have a perspective on this sort of situation that allows me to attempt to deal with it in a mature way. I feel that both I and much of the company I keep have grown out of the sort of drama that has kids being unintentionally cruel to each other. Unfortunately, being twenty, I am still close enough (at least temporally) to such experiences as they played out in my life, that seeing it happen to kids, especially kids in my program, is particularly difficult for me. There's little that is more traumatic than losing friends because they move on when one isn't ready for them to.

It makes me reflect on whether I should have been more proactive in maintaining my friendships in high school. Maintaining friendships is something I struggle with now, but I wonder if it stemmed from the point in high school when I needed friends most, but mine had disappeared. If I had attempted to communicate with my friends and remain friends with them, would I have had such a difficult time with my parents' divorce? Would I be as timid and anti-social as I find myself now?

Honestly, there's no use in asking these questions, except as a means for learning from my past behaviors. What I have to take away from being timid is that being timid is not actually a bad thing; being shy or timid only comes back to hurt me when I let it. And I know I'm about to spout a cliché here, but if all one and three eights people that might see this post could bear with me, I need to learn what is worth fighting for, and just fight.

That didn't feel like four brief paragraphs. It felt much much longer.