Cliques: a group of people with shared interests, commonly found in high school, given assumptions based on unfair and often untrue stereotypes. Also the reason why you don’t know much about the kid who sits next to you in math class. 

If you’ve ever attended – actually, if you’ve ever even stepped inside of a high school, then you know what I’m talking about, because cliques are everywhere. 

Admit it – you haven’t approached that boy in your art class because he’s part of the ‘popular’ group, and you don’t think you’re ‘cool enough’ for that. You didn’t join that club because the ‘geeks’ were running it. And you, my friend, didn’t sit with that lonely girl at lunch because you were afraid of being perceived as ‘weird.’

Don’t lie to yourself because you’ve probably done it. Cliques are an inevitable part of high school, but unless we learn to avoid them, then I guess we’ll never meet truly fascinating and interesting people, and that would be a crying shame. 

Shout out to the kid in my fourth period free who invited me to sit with him and his friends to play a card game. If he had never asked me to play with them, we might’ve never crossed paths, and I would be short a few friends today. Honestly, this person has some really cool things to say.

Let me shine a light on my classmate who passed by me and another friend at lunch one day. They sat down and engaged in a 30-minute discussion about theoretical situations that would never happen in real life. Seriously, you find out a lot about a person when they tell you the first thing they’d do after being frozen for 50 years. 

And to my favorite person on planet earth: if our chemistry teacher had never made a seating chart, I might not have gotten through sophomore year!  Truthfully, I never would’ve thought we had so much in common, but it turns out you and I have the exact same sense of humor and identical perceptions of life as a whole. Thank you Mrs. McGuinn, for the best seating chart ever. 

On that note, are seating charts really that awful? Agh, the horror! Sitting next to somebody who’s, *gasp*, not in the same friend group as me? 

C’mon, guys! We only have four years of high school, then we graduate, not knowing half the people we spent our entire childhood with. If you think about that, it’s a pity. Stop sitting with your best friend – she’ll be there tomorrow. Instead, opt to sit with somebody you’ve never spoken with, and you might be pleasantly surprised. Is the only thing stopping you from getting to know your peers something as silly as a clique? 

Opinion articles written by staff members represent their personal views. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent WSPN as a publication.