The Desire To Belong

While attending high school for four straight years, the personalities of many different teenagers change in order to satisfy not only their own beliefs, but also the opinions of others. I remember my high school principal telling me at the 9^th grade orientation to write down the names of my two best friends. She then said to check and see if those people are still your friends by the time that you graduate. This ended up being completely true for me; my once best friend and I never speak anymore, and neither of us feel the need to do so. This is just one of the stories of how people change while they are in high school.

Cliques are often discouraged in high school, but they still seem to appear quite often in many different forms. There are even names given to each of these groups that are then used to classify individuals through various situations. You might call someone Emo because they are friends with someone who has a boyfriend who dresses in an emo-like fashion. This is completely stereotyping someone and it happens everyday to almost everyone in every high school across the world. Even though these criticisms are often taught to be avoided by teachers and parents, the problem continues to persist year after year.

Sometimes people are put down by these clicks and it can lead them to feel worthless and unimportant to the rest of the world. Of course some people feel so terrible that they end up killing themselves so that they can relieve the pain that they feel from the abuse. Others chose to confront the other students; either through extreme violence, language, or possibly even murder. It makes me sad to hear the stories about school shootings because this is the place where they usually start. After the young man was treated like crap from a certain group of people he might chose to bring a gun to school; killing his teachers, a couple of the students, and then eventually himself. All of the shootings seem to arise from a situation just like this one.

Teenagers now have the deep desire to belong to one of these clicks, or important groups of people. They begin to depend on these same people, all while forgetting about the old friends that they used to have. Sometimes this desire ends in deadly consequences and can ruin the lives of these normal teenagers. If we could just be friends with everyone we would never have to worry about a problem such as this one. The problem actually has continued to get worse and there is a deep need to stop the abuse and desire of teenagers to belong to one specific group of people.