Making Cuts

Prioritize your friendships.
This one may seem cold but it is very necessary. When you leave high school many people are looking back; thinking about the things that are going to change, the people they are no longer going to see, the parties that will no longer happen, the events that will no longer be on the calendar, and the friends that may be moving away. It is a time of mourning and people don’t usually stop to think about the positive changes ahead. When you move beyond the corridors of your high school you can count on a few very exciting changes in your social world, you will form new kinds of relationships with others and what you come to see as your peer group will expand and evolve. You will make new friends and some of these friendships will be deeper and more fulfilling than you can even begin to imagine. You will fall in love in a whole new kind of way. You will find that age will no longer define who is “above” you and who is “below” you. Your boss may be younger than you, your teacher may be closer to your age than to your parents’, your best friend may end up being a decade older than you and you may fall for somebody much, much younger. The rules of social interaction will change and the basic building blocks of your relationships will drastically change with them. As this starts to happen, and it is inevitable, your old high school ties will unravel. Some of your old friends will be stuck in a rut that you may no longer be able to identify with, some may be engulfed by their own new lives with little time left over for the old, and others may be so separated by geography that the emotional distance between you grows to match. At this point you will want to make room for the new people in your life and this will require you to rearrange the old. You will likely find that some friendships will completely disappear, others will evolve into acquaintances, and some will become even closer and more important than they were in high school. Take inventory and decide which friendships are most worthy of your time and effort and act accordingly. Changing the faces of your friendships is a normal part of growing up and even though it can be heartbreaking it is something that everybody endures and survives. This brings us to the final step in maintaining the friendships that matter the most… meshing your worlds.

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