High School Confidential

By Emily Parker

	Emily Parker is a sophomore at John Jay High School. She loves to read and her passion is writing.

The doors to a high school are like an entry to a whole other world. Once someone enters, there is no turning back. Everything hits full blast, and one gets so overwhelmed that they tend to make the wrong choices with the wrong people. And if they continue down this path of wrongdoings, it becomes nearly impossible to double back and take a new route.

A high school is full of endless possibilities and endless regrets. There’s stress, drugs, cliques, peer pressure, and much more that can influence a teenager’s life. Some are able to look past all of these things and continue with their lives, while others get caught in the maze of distractions like a moth in a spider’s web. The more they struggle to get out, the more tangled up they get.

A high school is a place where one can recreate themselves. There are a variety of people: the jocks, the emos, the goths, the druggies, the nerds, the loners, the popular crowd, the preps, the sluts, and the people who just don’t belong to a particular group. One may get overwhelmed by all of the potential people that they can become and in the midst of all the anxiety, settle into the wrong crowd. There is so much pressure to make the perfect impression and not be deemed to be in the “nerd” or some other bad crowd.  Sometimes, the stress and pressure can become too much for someone and they will resort to drugs and get pulled into the “druggie” crowd. Once one becomes part of a group, they’re most likely to be known as by that for the rest of their high school career.

In order to become part of the “popular” crowd, people leave their own friends and start forming negative friendships with people that they don’t really like because they have a high status. The desire to be popular and fit in is so great that some people will resort to partaking in behavior deemed outside of their normal comfort zones, possibly disregarding certain morals and values. Peer pressure destroys who one really is and ends up turning them into someone else completely. Everyone always says to “be yourself,” and although it is a true statement that will make it so much easier to get through life, it just isn’t possible in high school.

People are constantly on edge about what everyone is thinking about them and whether they are “fitting in” or not. People fear that who they really are isn’t good enough; therefore they try to become someone they are not. Peer pressure can change someone so much that the person starts to believe that he or she is the person they have become and that it isn’t worth trying to change back into whom they once were. But they’re wrong. If someone really wanted to turn their life around and start fresh, they could, but only if they try. This is why so many people look forward to college. They can start over new and leave their high school lives behind.

Those who are of a high status sometimes fear leaving high school because it was the peak of their popularity. In college, and the real world for that matter, there’s no popular and unpopular because there are so many people that it is impossible to form groups like the ones formed in high school.

When one grows older and looks back on high school, they may think it silly that they had ever acted the way they did. But when you are actually in it, there is nothing silly about it. It is real and serious. Cliques are a way of life. There is nothing one can do to make it go away. One can never change who they really are, but they can disguise themselves pretty well.

High school can have drastic effects on people if they choose to allow it. If one walks through those double doors with their head held high and their mind open, they will have absolutely no problem adjusting to the ever-anticipated, ever-feared, high school life.