You are halfway through high school. You are trying to figure out who you are. I see you struggling to make connections and find friends, and my heart aches for you.
I want you to know that I see you. Not just the struggle, but who you are when your heart is leading you.
You are a kind person who respects others. You are a hard worker whether that is in the classroom, on the basketball court, or when we are serving others. When someone asks something of you, you rise to the request. Even when you are not sure you can do it, you do it anyway. That takes guts. Most people are not able to do that. You are involved in leadership at school and church. You are trusted by your teachers. You are not afraid of a challenge. Though nervous, you will speak in public and you come across as very likable.
You are a really good young man.
I know that does not make the struggle feel any lighter right now. I know that being told you are doing well does not fill the ache of wanting to belong somewhere. So I want to tell you about when I was your age, because I struggled too.
I did not go to a small school like you do. I went to a large school where you could easily hide in plain sight. I struggled to connect with any of the groups. I enjoyed sports but was not a jock. I liked to skateboard but did not connect with the other things the skaters were into. We lived in a nice neighborhood but we were not wealthy, so I never felt like I belonged in that group either. I had two or three friends at any given time and I was not the closest friend any of them had.
I remember struggling with girls. I often found myself in what people now call the friend zone before there was even a term for it.
I did not know who I was either.
I worked a lot because I wanted money to buy things. I wanted freedom but did not understand the personal responsibility that comes with it. I wanted to make my own decisions but I was easily impressionable and found myself getting into trouble because of it.
I had started going to church in high school, but nobody was close enough to me to notice anything they could help me correct. My parents divorced when I turned thirteen, which gave me a lot of unsupervised time. That led me to spend time with others who were unsupervised as well. It was the nineties. Nobody was paying attention to what we were doing, which made it easy for us to explore things that were not healthy or beneficial for teenagers.
I barely got my high school diploma. I tried college but I was impatient and wanted to work. I was living on my own and had expenses. That limited my options. I had desires, but the way I was living my life day to day was not in line with them.
I am telling you this because I want you to understand that I am not speaking from theory. I am speaking from lived experience. I made the mistakes. I felt the emptiness. I spent years finding my way back to who I was supposed to be.
You already have experience that many adults will never have because they are too afraid to try. When you put yourself out there the way you do, there are typically two responses you will get from others. Some might lift you up for doing something hard. But more likely, some will tear you down because your willingness to try makes them feel like they are less.
Jealousy is a natural human response. It is not a good one, but we all let it happen to us at times. Those who are more self-aware catch themselves and move past it. Others stay jealous and find other people to validate their feelings.
This is important to understand because it explains a lot of what you are experiencing.
In groups, most people are insecure. If they were not, they would not need the group. People who are secure in who they are typically have a few close friends, not a group of people who only exist because of proximity to something like school or work.
If your goal is to find a group to belong to, you will eventually find one. I did. But here is what I learned. There are far more groups that exist just to meet everyone’s need to belong than there are groups that exist to strengthen and build up each other.
It hurts to not be included. At times you might feel like putting forth whatever effort it takes to be part of a group, even if that means becoming someone you are not.
I caution you against this.
At first you will be uneasy about conforming. But eventually you will push that uneasiness down enough that you are no longer the person you were. You become part of the group. If the group starts to do things that are not good, you will too, because your identity is now the group and not your own.
This is when you start to get into trouble. When you give your identity to something else.
People give their identity to all sorts of things. This is not just a high school issue. It happens throughout life. The problem is that the group exists to solve everyone’s need to belong and usually nothing more. A deeper friendship can form with someone within the group, but the group itself and the need to be part of it will usually remain more important than any individual relationship.
I also saw guys in the group date girls from within the group. Then they would break up, causing a rift. Then they would start dating others within the group until eventually almost everyone had dated each other to some extent. That brought a lot of interpersonal damage and made the group even more susceptible to allowing others with bad influence in. That is not unique to when I was growing up. It is still happening the same way today.
Right now your school life feels like your entire life because it consumes the majority of your day. But your school life is not your life.
Your family is your life.
The people who will exist after you graduate high school, who will exist after college, who will be there throughout your adult years, are your family. There is a reason it does not feel right to change yourself to be part of a group at school. Those people are not your family. They are people you are sharing an experience with for a few more years.
You may stay in touch with a few of them after high school. I hope that happens. Being older and having friends with that long of a history together is an amazing thing that not many people have. We allow life to take us all over the place, moving away from those we were once close with.
I learned this when we moved to Montana. Proximity matters for all relationships. It is hard to stay close to people if you are not close in physical distance. I hope and pray you are able to make some of those lasting connections here. They might not be from your school. The few friends I still have from my teenage years did not go to the school I went to.
The key is to be authentically you.
You might not know exactly what that looks like right now. But if you allow older people in your life to mentor you, you will figure it out much earlier than I did. I did not even know mentorship was a thing until I had made enough mistakes that I was too afraid to open up to someone and tell them what I really wanted for my life.
If belonging to a group is more important to you than developing who you are as an individual, you are putting off your own growth for years. Maybe even decades. Eventually, those in the group who realize it is holding them back will leave. The group will continue to deteriorate. The only people left will be the most self-absorbed, and they will use you so they can continue to exist and feel like they have some kind of purpose.
So does this mean you cannot be friends with people who are part of a group?
No. It means you might not fit into the group as a whole. You already know that the people you have spent one-on-one time with are different in that setting than they are when part of the group. They are likely dealing with the same identity issues you are. They know they can have close and meaningful friendships with individuals but have to become something else to be part of the group. They do not know what to do with that disconnect, so their behavior can at times be hurtful as they try to cling to the group.
There are other ways to earn respect and build connection without lowering yourself to become like others.
People are naturally drawn to those who are doing exemplary things. While it may cause jealousy in some, others will want to break away from the group to see what you are doing.
The key is that you have to actually be doing something exemplary.
Perhaps that could be basketball, which is something you enjoy. You are already putting in the hours at practice, but if you spent the majority of your downtime working out and building your skills, you would quickly become an exemplary player at your school. People will notice how you have changed and they will be attracted to that.
Of course, if your motivation to be exemplary is simply to be liked, you will eventually feel empty. You have to have the right motivation. You have to do it for yourself.
I started getting up at four in the morning to work out and start my day because I wanted to and knew it was the best thing for me. For some reason, that intrigues people. I have been self-employed and like to build my own things because that is how I am wired, and it intrigues people as well. There are times I have tried to do things for attention and it has always failed me. When I was young, it led me to get into trouble. Now it simply wastes my time and leads to me losing interest.
What I have found is that the way you lead your life right now and the people you surround yourself with is very important. If you do not choose these people well, you will not become who God designed you to be.
As long as we are seeking to find our identity in groups of people or things rather than in our Creator, we will always feel unfulfilled. An identity in Christ is the only sustainable identity that works throughout all of life. Everything else is temporary and only lasts so long as it serves our immediate needs.
If you spend your teenage years conforming in order to belong, it will be hard for you to break those habits when you are a young adult. Once you bring those habits into your twenties, they will likely become who you are.
These years are the most important years of your life because you have the ability to create who you want to be. It might not be popular in the moment, but I can promise you the sacrifices now will produce rewards that will last the rest of your life.
I am learning these things in my forties. You can learn them right now.
I love you and want the best for you. I want better for you than I could have ever imagined for myself. You can prevent years, perhaps decades, of pain and suffering by learning to be self-aware and not allowing your emotions to lead you to lower yourself or make decisions you know are not the best option. You can provide an even better foundation for your future children than I knew how to provide for you.
I love and cherish the moments you are honest and vulnerable with me. I know that I am not always an approachable person. I get frustrated and have moments of selfishness that can make me feel unsafe at times. I often expect you to be able to meet me where I am, though I am in my mid-forties and you are in your mid-teens. Part of those expectations is why your maturity level is closer to an adult than a typical teenager. But I need to remember that while you are getting older, you are still young, and I should meet that with patience.
I know that you will figure it out. You will avoid many of the pits I fell into because you are much stronger than I was. I can already see the man you are becoming, and it is pretty amazing.
I love you and I am here with you through it all. Nothing is too much for me to help you with. And when you need me to, I will carry you through it.
~Dad
