I’m indifferent. I had fun while I was in high school, but ready to graduate after 4 years. I liked what I did in high school and have happy memories, but I’m not one of those people with a burning itch to re-live it, or wish it had lasted longer. It served it’s purpose, I enjoyed it while it lasted, and 4 years was the right amount of time.
For me, high school was marked by two things:
- a lot of social ebb and flow,
- and the situation at home was between crap and shit.
The idea of going back to my teenage years is so painful due to #2 that I can barely give a shit about what high school itself was like. It was four years I spent counting down the days until I turned 18 and either left for college or, if Dad didn’t get a job again (he did), started trying to get jobs from people who thought my parents were rich (they weren’t, and if they’d been, Mom would have spent anything she could get hands on anyway).
Everything from 7th grade on sucked. We moved a lot, and after a certain age, the kids stopped thinking, “I wonder if the new kid will be friends with me?” and started thinking, “Let’s fuck with the new kid.”
I finally got my feet under me, socially, in 12th grade, but no, I don’t look back on HS fondly.
High school was a living hell for me. I liked most of my teachers and enjoyed learning. The other students hated me and made sure I knew it. It didn’t help that the school system never knew what to do with me. I went to 9 different high schools.
Hell no. I started to type more, but… Just hell no.
The only thing I wanted to get out of high school was to get out of high school! Going away to college was when my real life began.
Its funny I recently started talking with a friend back from high school, and it’s amazing what she remembers and Ive totally forgot about. We are talking 40 plus years ago, and she can remember us talking and even having a class or two together. LOL I can’t remember but just bits and pieces and virtually none of what she remembers. Basically I remember see her and thinking she was hot though we never dated or anything. That said we both have lead eventful lives, I got two wonderful daughters bur we both agree if we could back knowing what we know now we both would have done a lot of things differently. Not that we are totally unhappy just high school college and being a young adult flipping rocked LOL. Funny thing I would likely be more academic and participate more in sports and other activities. But yea Id go back in a heartbeat think I could still do all I want to do and still hook up with my ex wife and have my kids and who knows I might be able to even avoid the pratfalls of young marriage and stay married.
I had some good times in high school and learned a lot, but I struggled emotionally. In my freshman year, I got assaulted (not at school), and started getting panic attacks. In my sophomore year, my father became very ill and was in and out of the ICU for over a year. We were constantly on the verge of losing him.
I skipped my senior year and went to college because I’d outgrown high school. It’s kind of ironic that I ended up teaching high school for 25 years and loved it.
I am so sorry to hear that, I’ve got sisters and of course daughters, I definitely know it’s a whole different world for females. It’s hard enough going through those awkward years without any of that other stuff, I’ve heard stories from all of them and my old friend too.
Yes and no. Much like my general anxieties, my high school career was one of extreme ups and extreme downs.
I was a fairly popular kid but I managed to alienate and isolate from time to time. I was generally invited to all the parties, or at least I had enough of a tentacle in the grapevine that I always found about them. I played soccer and I was on the ski team, I ran track and played a little baseball. I was a pretty good soccer player (co-captain, Eastern ME State champs freshman year and senior year), an above average skier (State Champs Jr. year), lost on a track meet track and a horrible at baseball, but that was me … mediocre but shiny enough to stand out sometimes.
I had girlfriends, but I graduated a virgin. That’s the low part – without going into a horrible amount of details, I basically had crippling anxiety when it came to intimacy and the opposite sex. I just never figured out how to be a normal adolescent - I was always too much inside my own head.
Of course, looking back now, I can see how I probably needed the help I only sought thirty years later.
In conclusion - first world problems. Essentially, the issues I had as an adolescent had little to do with what I did or didn’t do in high school. When it comes to generally having fun and being social, I was on top of my game; figuring out how to start life was a little more problematic for me.
I don’t recall highschool as being a big part of my life at all, I went, I did my lessens and I went home, my social and private life was totally separate from my school life and while there was some crossover I pretty much had a completely different circle of friends that I hung out with outside of school to those I hung out with in school
I have been randomly writing down memories in my journal recently and one thing I have noticed is how utterly blank the school part is. I spent vast quantities of my one precious childhood and teens sitting at a desk. What a weird thing that is to contemplate. I was very good at school by and large but because I was much brighter than almost anyone else, was crap at sports, and had very few social skills, due to my upbringing and personality, I do not remember much of anything pleasant. In high school I was a lonely freshman, my sophomore year I fell in with the group of seniors that were the Smart Bad Kids, which was fun but also I was way out of my depth and got into strange trouble. Then they all graduated and went away to college and I sank into a deep lonely depression. I managed to get enough credits going to community college that next summer to graduate in three years, and I disappeared from that place, never to return.
I remember high school as a time of swirling turmoil and bewilderment, sandwiched between times of intense loneliness. Things improved once I got away from home.
All 4 years were a nightmare.
Endless bullying & beatings.
Social alienation.
Constant abuse.
My family moving 3 times in 4 years didn’t help any, either.
No, I did not enjoy it at all. We moved a lot so I was always the new girl. That’s never much fun.
Oh hell no. School sucked; the school divisions this side of the pond are slightly different, but the bit that corresponded to US high school was the worst.
I remember a few of the teachers fondly, and I am still friends with one old classmate and vaguely in touch with a few more, but they were a few bright spots in a mire of suckitude. It got worse in the final years as all of my actual good friends left as soon as they were able, moving to colleges elsewhere (as I said, different system) while my mother refused to let me do so as she was convinced that school was better (best I could tell the school maintained good overall grades by harassing any student not achieving them until they quit- bullies were tolerated, poor grades were not). My home life at the time was pretty rubbish as well.
I didn’t hate it, I essentially liked it, but I didn’t/don’t care enough about that time or have enough real friends to bother going back for my 40th anniversary. I was a really shy, bookish kid with only a few close friends, and of those 2 went to other schools.
Actually, now that I think about it, that gathering was supposed to have been 2 weeks ago. I guess it’s been postponed
Yes but my friends all lived right near me so I did not have any good friends other than those 6 guys. (I’m a guy too) I never go to reunions and I don’t use facebook so I don’t know what anyone is up to now or since then which is 40 years. 3 of the 6 guys are still in town, 1 in FL , 1 in DC and 2 I don’t know where they are. I live in NC
I won’t go into details. I ended up in such a terrible high school that the subsequent 20-month military service was a merry summer camp by comparison.
High school was OK, but I was too shy to get a lot out of it. Within my little groups (chorus, French club, Spanish club) I had friends and fun, but overall, it was just something to get thru so I could move on to real life. I’m only sorta in touch with 2 or 3 of my former classmates (out of 850-ish in the class) and honestly, I really don’t miss much about it. I didn’t hate it, but it absolutely was not the best time of my life, and I wouldn’t go back for any reason.
HS itself in upscale suburbia was OK if a little confining. Neither a blast nor a chore.
I’m not real proud of the cramped, difficult, and unhappy character I was then, and would not want to relive being that guy. If I could re-do it as age 30s me without chafing at the restrictions of teenhood it’d be a lot LOT better. That guy was way short of the today me, but at least he had some clue about having fun & getting along.
I haven’t had any contact with any HS friends since I moved away 3 months later to attend college a whopping 50 miles away. That speaks volumes right there.