A Happy Medium, by Erin Murtaugh

This week’s column goes out to all the teens in high school, although it can apply to anyone at any age really.

Friendship. Every friendship has its ups and downs. If you’re reading this, I hope you have at least one person you can truly consider a friend and share personal things with. Everyone needs a friend to lean on.

I went to St. Theodore Catholic School for elementary school. There, classes were very small. At the time, my friend group was a very tight-knit group of girls in my grade. We did everything together.

Once we all moved up to Southwest Middle School, we split into new groups of friends. With more people our age around us, we were able to find more friends with whom we had more things in common. The St. Theodore girls always stayed friends; we just grew into different people and made new friends.

Then comes high school. As if teens don’t go through enough change going to middle school and then being put in the high school, guess again. You learn even more about who you are as an individual in high school.

Opportunities to join new clubs, sports and other activities come up. Being involved in things that your friends might not be makes another chance to meet new people and make new friends.

It’s kind of funny how many groups of friends I have bounced through in high school because of my changing interests. It’s a little overwhelming every time you shift into a new friend group, but chances are if you go into a new one, it’s because your new friends are even more like you than your old friends were.

Sometimes it feels like you’re alone in the change of friends while growing up. If you ever feel that way, believe me, you are not alone. No matter how many times you find yourself transitioning through friends, you’ll always find yourself with stronger relationships than before.

 

Albert Lea resident Erin Murtaugh is a senior at Albert Lea High School.