Highschool was the worse

I would do a lot of things to be able to go to high school 10 years earlier. 

There are a lot of things I would sacrifice to be able to go to high school without the existence of instagram, tiktok, mobile smartphones. Having now taken the full step to not just delete the instagram app, which I did 4 months ago, but to also deactivate both my accounts, let me write about just how shit highschool was; and how long I have been lying to myself. 

I started my website and subsequently my blog in my senior year of high school. In my earliest blog posts, you can see the remnants of phony optimism in the words I typed. I say 'phony', because I still consider myself pretty optimistic, but in those posts I can clearly see me lying to myself in order to feel a little less of a loser. 

Yeah, high school was the worse. I was invisible. I wasn't even a background character. I was non-existent. To other people, I may have been just okay to be around in school, wanting to do anything outside of school was with me was not even a consideration. And no matter what I did to at least become background character B, it just was never really my time to shine. High school is always portrayed as the best time of your life. Even before I was in high school, I already knew it was all bullshit, there was no high school musical, and I was fine with not having a flashy, eventful life. But what really hurt, was not having any of the mundane. There were no train rides chatting with a friend home. There were no detours to stop by a place instead of going straight home. There were no spontaneous hangouts, stopping by a friends house, or late night chats. At least for me. Normal highschool activities, I feel like I completely missed out on. 

I lied, actually, in my first year, there was train rides, detours, hangouts, and chats. For about 6 months in freshman year. I still had friends from people who went to the same middle school as me. And then I didn't. Calling it a falling out is too dramatic, but calling it drifting away is too understated. It wasn't a falling out because there wasn't some big fight that split everyone, and it wasn't a drift away because the group continued to be relatively close. It was just me. I don't know what started it, but one day you aren't invited to a hangout. Then, the group chats you're in go silent. Then, when you ask what they're doing they go silent. "The best years of my life" are words I thought of when I tried to invite one of those 'friends' to a christmas hangout, and he just starts walking away faster and faster. I never really celebrated my birthday. I hated that day. Opening my phone and seeing no notifications. In modern teenage culture, on someones birthday, people would post happy birthday wishes on their instagram stories, and tag the person. That person would then repost it. It was always a force of flaunting to me. "Look at how many friends I have, who want to wish me happy birthday!" 

I can't even blame them for not wanting to be friends with me anymore. I was awful to be around. Always angry, always negative, always insecure, and argued with everyone over stupid shit. I was not interesting in the slightest, I had zero hobbies or interests outside of studying and playing video games, and being on discord. I probably deserved it. 

To be split from that group was one thing, but I think I rather have just spent my entirety of high school alone than to know that for the next 3 years, they were laughing at me. Because of how insecure I felt about this, I tried to compensate in other ways to lie to myself that, I was doing ok. In the rare times I hung out, it was mainly to convince myself that "see! I'm doing normal high school things too! Like hanging out with friends!" Needless to say, I didn't enjoy those times. I did not like the people I was hanging out with. I tried clubs. Forced myself to stay in the godforsaken high school building for another 2 hours just to try to see if I would fit in. It was even worse because I knew it was bad, but I kept telling myself that it wasn't. I found myself within the fence of many groups. Not really particularly part of any of them, but just there so I could be less lonely during lunchtime. I didn't have that much fun because I had 0 connection with any of these people, but I pretended and adjusted to every single conversation, every single person, just to feel like absolute shit at the end of it because they would never reciprocate the effort I put in. Any efforts into hanging out was just "I'm busy." I never talked to them outside of the 45 minutes of a lunch period. Yeah, I ate lunch alone for most of high school. Actually, I didn't even eat lunch for the first half. I was far too insecure to take off my mask in freshman and sophomore year. That's how I dropped to 90 pounds. There was a retarded social media thing called "mask fishing" where people would say you looked way better with the mask on and ugly as fuck with it off. Insecure me, who was already insecure with my face since elementary school, started to get more and more pimples, and there was just nothing I could do about it. 

I'm still in a 6 year battle between me and my skin. I have some of the most painful and bad hormonal acne, face, chest and back acne, that I can't do anything about. I've been using tretinoin for my face and body for 2-3 years now, where it did help clear up the worse of my face, but my body is still left awful. Some of my old shirts have blood stains on the back because of my acne. The derm said it typically lasts up until 19-22. 

High school was the worst. I hate smartphones. Every interaction was spent between the phone. Sometimes they'd get distracted as we talked and start scrolling. Get a notification and start texting. Instagram and tiktok made it hell. It was always about who's attractive, who's smart, this and that. I never had tiktok, and not having it felt like being 10 miles behind in a marathon I didn't want to run in. It interfered with everything. It changed everything. People didn't even have hobbies anymore. All they wanted to do was scroll. 

I wish I could restart highschool. Click play and restart as many times as I want to. In particular, choose a time, any time before smartphones. It ruined me. It changed everything. It changed how people talked, how people treated each others, how people viewed things. I wasted my high school years, having nothing and in denial about everything. I was never happy and hate myself so much. So many actions I wish I never did, so many words I wish I never/should've said. Hearing how my millennial cousins describe their time in school made me so envious. Is the grass really always greener on the other side if the grass on my side is dead and withered by famine, and the other side so luscious and gorgeous?