As an avid enjoyer of chick flicks and high school dramas, movies give you a very fanciful picture of how high school can look like. The underdog becoming the class valedictorian, having a complete 180 makeover, going from geek to Greek and despite all odds, winning at the end of the day. No matter how much of an outcast you are, by the time you graduate, you’ll want change and occasionally stage a coup d’état to turn around the existing social hierarchy (yes The Outcasts, 2017). As ambitious as this sounds, high school in real life (minus all the cliché tropes because those definitely exist) is not exactly sunshine and rainbows. Reality is about having to suck it up and realise that this is life as a teen.

School bullies are some of the most creative people you will ever meet. Inventing new grounds every single day to harass people based on, they are part of a vicious cycle and the worst part is that there is no proper intervention. Body? Wealth? The fact that you like books? You name it. They’ll take it up. While in most cases nowadays, the warfare is psychological with passive bullying being the new norm. What is interesting is that authorities who actually exercise power do not bat an eye for some reason and student bodies in schools themselves, to put it in the nicest terms, are inefficient.

From observing, I have known people who have had their fair share of memories that will last, haunt to be more specific, them for a lifetime. From body-shaming to being ostracized just because they have different priorities, the list is endless. And all of them remembers school as someplace from a past they’d like to forget. Above it all, the biggest luxury perhaps is getting to be open about your involuntarily caused hatred of school.

The real fun is when you’re the new kid. Moving can be great — a fresh start — but not if you have the social skills of ‘that nerd from that one movie’. Those who are able to make friends with the entire school within a week, you’re my heroes!

This is school and it sucks for us but not for the usual reasons. If it’s worth anything though, some end up being way cooler (apologies for the loose, arbitrary use of language) after getting out of the system than others and again it’s not who already was. Safe to say, for the scapegoats of the rich, school life will not be nostalgic. For the ones who are barely there, school life will not be nostalgic. The real nostalgia being, of course, the few great people you meet along the way — the diamonds in your carbon lives.