No jewellery. No long nails. White shoes only. A very specific uniform. No random coloured jackets or anything that wasn’t part of the dress code. You get the idea.

It was a very well known private school, and there were rules for practically everything. And somehow, we managed to get in trouble almost every single day.

Sometimes nail paint on our nails.

Sometimes we wore the “wrong” shoes.

Sometimes we were laughing “way too loudly” in the hallway.

Sometimes we’d be running through the corridors, chasing each other like we had completely forgotten we were supposed to be in a school.

Sometimes we’d sit with the boys for far too long and apparently look suspicious enough for a teacher to come investigate.

And sometimes one of my friends would be sitting with her boyfriend, doing God knows what, and somehow we’d all end up getting in trouble.

There was always something.

And before anyone thinks I’m saying the rules were unnecessary, no. They weren’t. If every student behaved the way we did, the school would have been absolute chaos.

At the time, though? We were so frustrated.

We’d get scolded, walk back to class complaining about how unfair everything was.

And then we’d do the exact same thing again. Looking back now, it’s honestly hilarious.

We were immature. We were loud. We were chaotic. We were probably a teacher’s worst nightmare. But we were so much fun.

I wouldn’t encourage that behaviour now. Hell no. I wouldn’t want students like us. And am I proud of how often we got into trouble? Not particularly.

But would I relive it? Um… hell yeah.

Because at the time, getting scolded felt like the worst thing in the world. We couldn’t wait for the day we’d finally be done with school and wouldn’t have to follow all those ridiculous rules anymore. And then we actually left.

And suddenly, those annoying little moments became memories I would give anything to experience one more time.

The running in the hallways.The uncontrollable laughter. The stupid jokes. The getting yelled at together. The “okay, guys, we seriously need to behave this time” promises that lasted approximately two days.

We didn’t know it then, but we were living through one of those periods of our lives we’d eventually miss. Maybe that’s the weirdest part about growing up.

You spend so much time wanting to leave a moment, only to spend years wishing you could go back to it.

And yet, somehow, I ended up in the most chaotic, ugly situationship imaginable.

Yup. You read that right.

Now you’re probably thinking: weren’t you just saying you weren’t interested in relationships? Hypocrite.

Hear me out.

I was the most single person ever in my friend group. So naturally, when a guy with a “bad boy” reputation texted me, my friends went absolutely insane trying to convince me to give him a chance. And, completely out of character, I did. One conversation became daily conversations. There was nothing particularly romantic about it. We just talked.

Eventually, he hinted that he was developing feelings for me.

I had been very clear from the beginning that I liked someone else and didn’t feel the same way about him. But when I didn’t reciprocate, he called me a whore and accused me of flirting with his friends.

So I was done. I stopped talking to him.

Months later, he apologised. I forgave him, but kept my distance. Eventually, towards the end of grade 11, my friends convinced me to give him another chance.

This time, things felt different. He said all the right things. He supported me through a particularly lonely period of my life, and I have to give him credit for that.

And somewhere along the way, I got attached. Emotionally. I started depending on him. I started thinking maybe this could actually become something.

And that’s when everything went to hell.

Because behind all the right words was a pathological liar, manipulator and abuser. We fought every single day. He called me names. Accused me of flirting with everyone. Criticised my clothes, my friends and the people I spoke to. He even paid someone at my college to spy on me and report back to him.

He lied about having cancer.

He lied about leaving the country because I had “hurt” him.

He tried to manipulate me into giving him money despite being considerably wealthier than me.

And whenever we fought, he would hurt himself, threaten suicide, drink, smoke or use drugs, and somehow make all of it my fault.

So I started speaking less generally. Then even less. Because apparently existing the wrong way was enough to start another fight. And somehow, I stayed.

Not because I thought this was love. I was attached. I genuinely believed I was responsible for what he might do to himself. And a part of me kept thinking that maybe if I was patient enough, he would become the person I thought he was. He didn’t.

One day, while sober, he told me how much he “loved” me and how he wanted me in his life forever.

The next day, we had one of our worst fights yet.

A few weeks later, he called me. I assumed he wanted to apologise. Of course he didn’t. He told me he’d been talking to a girl for over a month and that she had apparently told him I was backbiting about him.

And that’s when I realised he had been two-timing me.

Now, technically, we weren’t together. There was no label, no relationship, nothing official.

But he had spent months telling me that we weren’t allowed to see or talk to anyone else.

Those were his rules. He got angry whenever I spoke to other guys, accused me of flirting with everyone, and made me feel guilty for having male friends. And all along, he had been talking to someone else for over a month.

And then came another plot twist: the girl he was talking to was actually one of my friends.

He recorded our call, tried to provoke me into saying things about my friends, yelled at me, and eventually started threatening to hurt them.

That was it. I blocked him. And then came the final level of insanity.

He started threatening to leak my friend’s nudes.

Which immediately raised two questions:

1. How the hell did he even have her nudes?

2. If he “loved” me so much, why was he keeping other girls’ nudes on his phone, especially my friend’s, and why had I never known?

My friend eventually told me she’d never even sent him anything. So the entire threat was another lie.

He continued threatening me and people around me for months. Eventually, it stopped.

It’s been almost two years now.

And sometimes I still think about the audacity of it all.

How someone can abuse you, manipulate you, isolate you, threaten you, and somehow still find a way to convince themselves that they are the victim.

The funniest part?

I used to run away from any romantic relationship, so I didn’t get a boyfriend.

I got a psychological thriller with a subscription plan.

And honestly?

At this point, it is so funny you guys have no idea.

At least, I thought we were.

Then came winter break during Grade 10. The first day back at school, I noticed something was different. We were walking together when I caught them exchanging looks while I was talking. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew something was off. Then lunch break came.

Everyone went outside without me. At first, I thought maybe they had just forgotten. So I went looking for them. I couldn’t find them anywhere. Eventually, I realized they weren’t missing.

They were hiding from me.

They didn’t want me to sit with them. I went back to my classroom and spent the rest of the break crying. The next day, it happened again. And the day after that. They would avoid me in the hallways, disappear during breaks, when I used to find them and sit with them they would run away one by one, ignore my messages and give me no explanation whatsoever. (now you must be thinking why would I try to talk to them and chase them, this will be answered later in this article)

I remember constantly asking myself: What did I do?

Because surely, if an entire group of people who had loved me for years suddenly wanted nothing to do with me, I must have done something terrible. Right?

I started writing. I wrote constantly. I wrote about what had happened, how I felt, what I thought I had done wrong. I wrote letters to them asking them to just tell me what was going on. I wanted an answer more than anything.

Eventually, I confronted my best friend. I asked her over and over: “What did I do?”

She kept telling me everything was fine. It wasn’t. This went on for months. (Whenever I tried having a mature adult conversation, they would pretend everything’s fine, there’s nothing wrong, they weren’t avoiding me and would get mad at me for not joining them in breaks and after classes, so I would go around looking for them each time, only to find out that they were hiding from me, again. Now you might think I was stupid but trust me I wasn’t, maybe if that situation happened today I wouldn’t give two shits about it but I was very young and very attached to my friends. They kept on explaining that there was nothing wrong, and when I used to find them and try to talk to them in school they would make faces at each other and leave the place one by one until I was sitting alone. All of this is said just to give you context on why I was behaving the way I was)

In the meantime, I made other friends, girls who eventually became some of the most wonderful people in my life. But that’s a story for another time.

Then, finally, someone told me part of the truth.

One of the girls in our group had a massive crush on a boy. His friend had apparently told her that the guy liked me. And she became jealous.

Instead of talking to me, she decided I was the problem. She created a story about me, telling my best friend that I had said horrible things about her and her family, that I mistreated her, that I was a terrible friend.

And my best friend believed her.

After years of friendship, she chose to believe someone else’s version of me without ever asking me what had actually happened. I remember feeling physically sick when I found out.

This was why?

All those months of crying. All those letters. All those unanswered messages. For this?

Eventually, things fell apart between them too. And my best friend came back to me and finally told me the truth.

I already knew. And somehow, I still let her back into my life. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know either.

I had spent a year being miserable because of these girls, and yet when she came back, I welcomed her. But there was something I never got.

An apology.

Not once did she acknowledge what she had done to me. Not once did she say she was wrong for believing someone else’s story over mine. And I think that’s the part that hurt the most. Because I loved her. Her family was my family. We had been so intertwined that I couldn’t understand how she could believe I was capable of doing those things without even asking me.

We eventually became friends again, but something had changed. And over the years, there were more problems. Eventually, we stopped talking. We still have each other on social media. We wish each other happy birthdays. There is no hatred between us.

But I don’t think I’ll ever look at friendship quite the same way again. She didn’t make me hate people. She made me understand that trust can break quietly.

I still make friends. I still love people deeply. I still trust people.

But maybe there’s always going to be a tiny part of me that remembers what it felt like to wake up one morning and realize that the people you thought were your safest place had decided they didn’t want you there anymore.

And maybe that’s okay. Because not every friendship is meant to last forever.

Some teach you, painfully, that losing someone doesn’t mean you have to lose your ability to love people too.

I don’t hate her. I don’t even think I want an apology anymore. I just wish that, back then, she had asked me one simple question:

“What actually happened?”

From the outside, I had everything.

The grades. The looks. The friends. The attention.

And I knew it. I won’t sit here and pretend I didn’t.

There was a certain kind of power that came with being the girl everyone knew. Being friends with me wasn’t some exclusive achievement, obviously. Everyone chooses their own friends. But when your friendship group happens to be the group everyone wants to be part of, you start feeling like you have some strange responsibility over it.

I always felt like I was the one deciding who belonged.

I wasn’t rude to people. I wasn’t the girl who would walk into a room and make someone feel small just because I could. In fact, I went out of my way not to. I made sure people were included in conversations. If someone was new, I’d talk to them. I hated the idea of someone sitting alone at lunch or feeling like an outsider in a new school, because I knew how uncomfortable that could be.

I genuinely tried to be kind.

And yet, behind my back, I was hearing things.

“Bitch.” “Brat.” “Mean girl.”

And the strange thing was that the people saying these things were often the sweetest people to my face. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand it. Because I was, and still am, honestly, one of the most self aware people I know. I knew I had privilege in certain ways. I knew I received attention. I knew I had a social position that other people didn’t. But I didn’t think I was cruel.

So I kept wondering: What was I doing that I couldn’t see?

I wish I could tell you I figured it out. I didn’t. Instead, I learned something much later.

Sometimes people can love you, admire you, depend on you, and resent you at the same time. And sometimes you don’t realise they’re resenting you until they’ve already decided they don’t want you in their lives anymore.

One of the people closest to me was my best friend.

She was incredibly introverted. She didn’t have many friends, and when we became friends, she became part of my social circle too. I introduced her to people. I brought her into conversations. I made her part of my world. And I never thought twice about it. That’s what friends do.

We had been friends since around Grade 4 or 5. So when Grade 10 came around, I thought I knew exactly where I stood with her.

I didn’t.

One day, after vacation, she didn’t come to my classroom during lunch like she normally did. I went looking for her. And when I got to her class, she had already left with the rest of the people I thought were my friends. She didn’t tell me anything. There was no confrontation. No argument. No explanation. Nothing. Just absence.

I still don’t completely understand what happened. And maybe one day I’ll tell you the entire story, because there is much more to it than this. But for now, all you need to know is that my entire world at school disappeared almost overnight. The girl who had spent years surrounded by people suddenly had no one.

For an entire year, I was alone.

I stopped going outside during breaks. I would sit in my classroom while everyone else went out. I started leaving school immediately after it ended. Sometimes I’d arrive late because I simply didn’t want to be there.

My confidence was gone. Completely.

It is difficult to explain what that does to you. You lose your understanding of yourself. I had spent years being the girl everyone wanted to be friends with. Then, suddenly, I was the girl eating lunch alone. And I had no idea how to be her.

Eventually, we became friends again. But it took multiple attempts at fixing things, and every attempt came from me. Even now, years later, that one year hasn’t completely left my heart. Not because I still hate anyone. I don’t. But because there is a particular kind of heartbreak in losing people who you thought were yours. Especially when you never understand why. And I think that’s the part of being the “popular girl” that nobody talks about.

Everyone talks about the attention. Nobody talks about the pressure.

Everyone talks about how lucky you are to have so many friends. Nobody talks about wondering whether those friendships are genuine.

Everyone assumes you must be confident. Nobody asks what happens when the people who helped build that confidence decide to take it away.

Being popular made me feel powerful.

But losing my friends taught me how powerless I actually was.

And perhaps the cruelest lesson was realising that sometimes your own friends can quietly build resentment towards you while you are completely unaware of it.

They can smile at you. Laugh with you. Tell you they love you.

And somewhere inside, they can be carrying jealousy, anger, comparison, or resentment that you know absolutely nothing about. I think that’s one of the worst things that can happen to someone.

Not losing a friend. But finding out that the friendship you were protecting wasn’t being protected by the other person in the same way.

For years, I thought being the popular girl was one of the best things that happened to me. Now, I’m not so sure. It gave me a huge circle, but it also made me question whether anyone inside that circle truly saw me.

And eventually, it cost me something I didn’t know I could lose: my confidence.

Maybe that’s why I don’t romanticise being the popular girl anymore. I don’t regret those years. There were genuinely beautiful moments. But if I could go back and tell my younger self something, it would be this:

You don’t have to be everyone’s favourite to be worthy.

And you certainly don’t have to carry an entire “girl group” on your shoulders just because people decided you were the girl at the centre of it. Because one day, the crowd might disappear.

And when it does, you need to know who you are without them.

This doesn’t mean you hate them, and it doesn’t mean you want to end the friendship.

Sometimes, your friend will do something that annoys you, hurt your feelings, or simply make you think, I really don’t like you right now.

And that’s okay.

No friendship is perfect. You’re allowed to be upset with someone you love. You’re allowed to need space.

2. Don’t try to hold on to every person in your life.

Give people your genuine effort. Show up for them. Try to make the relationship work.

And then, sometimes, let time do its thing.

Some people are there for a chapter, and when that chapter ends, you have to learn to move forward.

Some people stay.

Some people leave.

And some people become a beautiful part of your story that you will always be grateful for.

3. You don’t have to be liked by everyone.

There will be people who don’t like you, and sometimes you won’t even know why.

You can be kind, considerate, and still not be everyone’s cup of tea. Don’t spend your teenage years trying to make yourself smaller or more agreeable so that someone you think is cool approves of you. Being disliked doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done something wrong.

4. Being alone is not the same as being lonely.

Don’t stay in friendships just because you’re scared of having nobody.

There will be times when you sit alone at lunch, don’t get invited somewhere, or realize you don’t have the same group anymore.

It can hurt.

But being alone for a while is better than constantly being surrounded by people who make you feel alone or disrespected.

Learn to enjoy your own company.

5. You Don’t Have to Tell Everyone Everything.

I used to think that if I wanted to be friends with someone, or even just keep a conversation going, I had to tell them everything about myself.

But that’s not true.

You don’t have to overshare just to fit in. It’s okay to keep some things to yourself.

And keeping some things private doesn’t mean you’re being secretive.

6.Don’t Change Yourself Just to Be Loved.

You shouldn’t have to change everything about yourself just so someone will notice you or fall in love with you.

Of course, love can change you in beautiful ways. But that’s different from completely changing who you are just to become someone’s idea of what is lovable. Don’t pretend to like the things they like. Don’t change the way you dress, talk, laugh, or behave just because you think they’ll like you more that way.

Because eventually, you’ll get tired of pretending. You shouldn’t have to perform a version of yourself to make someone fall in love with you.

The right person shouldn’t fall in love with your facade. They should fall in love with you.

7. Take pictures, but don’t spend the whole moment taking them.

You’ll want proof that you were there.

Take the picture.

But then put your phone down.

Some of the happiest memories you’ll have won’t be perfectly documented. And one day, you might realize that you were so busy trying to capture your life that you forgot to actually live it. Not everything needs to be captured for your gram.

Life is bigger than the act you’re putting on your social media.

8. Your Parents Are Figuring It Out Too.

Your parents love you. They genuinely do.

Sometimes they may not know how to show it. Sometimes they might get frustrated, lose their patience, or even shout at you over things that don’t seem deserving of that reaction. Does that make it okay? Maybe not.

But as you grow older, try to see things from their perspective too. They brought you into this world. They raised you from nothing. They stayed up when you were sick, worried about you when you were hurting, worked to put food on the table, and tried to give you the best they could with what they knew.

They are human too. They have bad days. They get tired. They make mistakes. Sometimes they don’t know how to handle their own emotions, let alone yours. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything they do. It doesn’t mean you have to pretend something didn’t hurt you.

But maybe, when you can, be a little gentler with them. Be patient. Say thank you. Spend time with them. Give them a hug even when you don’t have a reason to.

Because one day, you might realise that while you were busy growing up, they were growing older.

And perhaps you’ll wish you had loved them a little more loudly while you had the chance.

9.You don’t have to make every moment meaningful.

Not every friendship needs to teach you a lesson.

Not every heartbreak needs to “make you stronger.”

Not every bad day needs to become a beautiful realization.

Sometimes something just hurts.

Sometimes you’re happy for no particular reason.

You don’t have to turn your entire life into a lesson.

You’re allowed to simply live it.

10.You Will Survive Things You Currently Think You Couldn’t

There will be days when you genuinely think, I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. And I know it sounds cliché, but time really does heal some things.

I know that’s much easier to say than it is to feel when you’re in the middle of the hurt. When something happens, it can feel like the end of the world.

But trust me on this one. It isn’t the end of the world.

The hurt won’t disappear overnight. You might carry it for a while.

But you have to keep moving forward.

Not because you’re supposed to forget what happened, and not because it didn’t matter. But because life keeps moving, and eventually, if you let it, time will do some of the healing for you.

One day, you’ll look back and realise:

I thought this would break me forever.

It didn’t.

You can fall in love with different people, in different ways, at different stages of your life. You can love your friends so deeply that losing them feels like losing a part of yourself. You can love someone romantically, lose them, and eventually find love again. You can love again and again. It is completely, beautifully normal.

But I believe there is one kind of love that you experience only once.

The kind that is almost painful in its intensity. The kind that breaks something inside you and somehow rebuilds you into someone you weren’t before. It hurts you, changes you, grows you. And somehow, even years later, it can still make you smile.

And when I say this, you probably already know which love I mean.

That person you thought of just now.

The first person who came to mind when someone said love.

That is the love I’m talking about.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the person you ended up with. In fact, perhaps it often isn’t. Sometimes the greatest loves of our lives are people who are no longer in them. They destroy you and rebuild you. They break your heart, and then, slowly, teach you how to put it back together. You learn what it means to miss someone. To want someone. To lose someone. You learn how deeply you are capable of feeling.

You learn to love with them.

And then you grow older.

You look back and tell yourself, That wasn’t love. I was young. I didn’t know what love was.

But perhaps it was.

It surely was.

Being young doesn’t make your feelings any less real. Not knowing how to name something doesn’t mean you didn’t feel it.

And this doesn’t mean that every love that comes after is somehow less real. The love you find later can be just as genuine, just as beautiful, perhaps even healthier. You can love someone deeply without them being that love.

I think we are sometimes afraid to admit that someone who is no longer part of our lives was once one of the great loves of our life.

Because if we admit that, we have to accept that some great loves don’t stay.

So instead, we rewrite the past.

It wasn’t love.

But maybe it was.

Maybe some people are not meant to be our forever. Maybe their purpose was simply to show us what it feels like to love with our whole heart, to lose, to hurt, to grow, and eventually to love again.

Some loves stay.

Some loves leave.

And some loves leave, but somehow never really stop being a part of who we became.

So why do we expect love to be any different?

Love is not something that can be perfectly put into words. It is not just affection, attachment, care, or admiration. Those words may describe pieces of it, but never the feeling itself. Trying to explain love using other words is like trying to explain the colour blue to someone who has never seen it. You can describe it endlessly, but they will not truly understand until they experience it.

Love is its own feeling.

It can make an ordinary moment feel significant. It can make someone else’s happiness feel like your own. It can make you miss someone even when you have nothing particular to miss about them. Sometimes it brings warmth, sometimes ache, sometimes both at once. And yet, somehow, all of it still feels like love.

Perhaps that is why love has so many definitions. Everyone tries to explain it through their own experience of it. What feels like love to one person may look completely different to another. There is no single shape it has to take.

You don’t need to know its definition to know that you love someone.

When you feel it, you know.

Maybe love was never meant to be explained. Maybe it was only ever meant to be felt.

You can genuinely love someone’s achievements, be proud of them, celebrate them and still have a quiet thought somewhere inside you that says, I wish it had been me.

And maybe that thought makes you feel guilty.

Maybe you wonder if being jealous, even for a moment, means you aren’t truly happy for them. Maybe you think a good person would only feel joy when someone else succeeds.

But I don’t think that’s true.

Sometimes another person’s success simply reminds you of something you deeply wanted for yourself. And for a moment, their happiness can hurt, not because you want to take it away from them, but because you wish you had something like it too.

You can clap for someone while wishing you were standing where they are.

You can be proud of how far you’ve come and still wish you had gone further.

Those feelings can exist together.

Being secure in yourself doesn’t mean you never compare yourself. It means you learn not to let comparison decide your worth. It means you can look at someone else’s life and say, I wish that were mine, without turning it into, therefore, I am not enough.

Their success is not proof of your failure.

Their timing is not a judgment of yours.

And your envy does not make you cruel, ungrateful, or a bad person.

Sometimes, it simply means you care deeply about becoming someone you’re proud of.

It makes you human.