Katie is a senior at Jacksonville High School. She is planning to attend Illinois College in the fall and major in biology. Her belief in change is based upon a friendship that changed and eventually fell apart after entering high school.
Many things can change in the course of a day. In Illinois, it can be sunny and warm one minute and snowy and windy the next. The goals and plans that you set for yourself in the morning after waking up can soon be replaced by other thoughts as they cross your mind during the day.
Most significant changes, however, take longer than a day to happen. People change. Personalities change. Ideas change. Morals change. Eventually, friendships have to change. Sometimes when two people have been friends for the majority of their lives, these changes happen naturally and flawlessly. They are able to overcome their differences and change with each other for the better rather than slowly drift apart.
Even though it may not seem like it at the time, change is for the better. A person who does not change can hinder those that do, a concept that I have become more than aware of in the past few years. Like most people, growing up I had a friend who was a follower rather than a leader, a person who would rather hide in the background and shun reality rather than voice her opinions and risk alienating people who were more popular than her. When we met, aspects of friendship that now seem critical to bond two people were not important in the slightest. The only thing that mattered was that we were the same age, both of us were girls, and we lived down the street from each other.
As the years progressed and elementary school turned into junior high which, finally, turned into high school, it was becoming increasingly evident to me just how different we had become in a few short years. Our morals, which had not yet surfaced at the young age of ten, were now present and aimed in completely different directions. A person like her, someone who was ignorant of the future and wanted to improve her present with the snap of her fingers, didn’t sit well with someone like me, a person who knows that what I do in the present will slowly but surely pave the way to the future.
Needless to say, the friendship has not survived. In the end, I finally realized that I had changed and she hadn’t, something that was hard to come to terms with and was even harder to act upon. How do you tell someone who has been your best friend for nearly seven years that you no longer want to be friends with them? The answer to that is something that I still wish I knew the answer to even now, nearly a year after the end of our friendship. In the end, I took the easy way out, which, in retrospect, was one of the most selfish and inconsiderate things I have ever done. Instead of talking to her about it, I cut off communication in an attempt to run, both from her and from my fear of confrontation. Looking back now, I wish I would have gone about that differently. However, much like the weather, it was bound to change over time. I just gave it the boost it needed and tried to hide from the tornado that followed.
I believe in change. The people who we are today are not the people we will be tomorrow. However, the people with whom we choose to spend our time will forever shape the people that we will become, which is precisely why it is important to choose your friends carefully. The impression that they leave us with will last for a lifetime, regardless of whether that impression is good or bad.