The Good from the Bad by Cassidy

The Good from the Bad by Cassidy - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

I began high school with everything on my side, having good grades, an athletic nature, and a very tight friend group. But I came to discover that it may have been a little too tight. In middle school, acceptance was all I sought, and it felt good to be locked into such an exclusive group, but looking back, I was representing all the aspects of a character who I stood against.
It wasn’t until halfway through my freshmen year that I gained a new perspective of the group I was a part of. I was getting pushed out of the group by my own friends; experiencing my first feelings of being completely worthless and foreign by those who used to strengthen and welcome me. Although this incident was very heartbreaking, it allowed me to understand how hurtful we were being to everyone else who wasn’t deemed “cool enough” to associate with us. I knew this was not what I stood for nor who I wanted to be so changes had to be made. I forced myself to step out of my comfort zone and completely start over.
I began surrounding myself with all new people from many different friend groups and let me tell you, when I stopped stressing about how I should act to fit in, I was able to see that the only way to do this right was to be myself. I was able to see myself for who I truly was in this phase and opened the door to so many valuable and fulfilling relationships that I had been missing out on; this whole time I had been so caught up in my private clique that I had actually just been excluding myself from the life I wanted to live.
Without this period of my life occurring, I would have never been able to stop myself from exercising a bad character and the discovery of freedom and true happiness would've been impossible to find. I am now surrounded by so many encouraging and lasting friendships that have lasted me my last three years of high school, and hopefully throughout life. This experience taught me so much about my identity and how to accept others because I know how it feels to be stepped on. I am so grateful that I was able to catch the wrong in what I was doing early on, because my high school experience has been made whole by all the people that unknowingly kept me moving forward.