The Thoughts of a Millennial Teen: Volume I, part i.

The first day is always filled with a certain level of uncertainty; you truly do not know what to expect when you first walk through those mysterious doors. I suppose every school is different, but from my four years of experience at this school, I can say that in some ways, school was my savior, and yet in other ways it was a major letdown.

There are definitely more niches in highschool where you can find your people and form meaningful friendships and relationships that I hope last a lifetime. On the bad side of that however, niches can become cliques, and when cliques form, individuality goes down the drain. It's glorified in movies like Mean Girls and Clueless, but truly it is much duller and darker. Girls don't rule the school and have fun and flip their hair side to side as they walk down the hall. Snide comments about your closest friends are often heard as soon as they walk away: the friendships that were supposed to last a lifetime are fragile, held together by a lie that everyone likes each other. The truth of the matter is that everyone is so insecure with themselves that they feel the need to constantly verbalize negativity about others near them to make themselves feel somehow "superior". For example, last year I watched a girl get bullied out of my school. People would never say the word bullied for fear that that was what it really was but that's the simple truth behind it. This girl got caught up in the hierarchy of teenagers and ended up losing her friends. Once they began to realize that they all shared a mutual dislike for this girl, they all banded together in order to ruthlessly target her until she was forced to leave. Now still the people who did this to her talk smack about her, to take the attention away from themselves, and I sit there and I smile and I listen, because I know that if I stand up to them I'll end up just like her.

Ostracized.