Takshkumar Patel

THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU SURROUND YOURSELF

Moving here from Canada during the seventh grade wasn’t easy for my family and me, especially since we had lived there for a decade. I remember my first day of middle school, not knowing a single person in a completely new environment, and it was the loneliest I ever felt. I hoped that I could make new friends quickly at this new school, but with my luck, the COVID-19 outbreak had begun, and two days into school, there I was being sent home for the next three months. Then 8th grade began, and it was the same feeling; I had to force myself to just hang around people and hope that they accepted me. It kind of “worked,” but I was never invited to anything; I was just the person people talked to at school and then never thought about after school was out. That’s essentially how my whole eighth and ninth-grade years went; then sophomore year began, and one of our AP Language teachers tragically had to leave due to health reasons during the last couple of months of the year. As high school students, we stopped doing any classwork and just talked all class. I got really close with four to five other students in the class, and I actually started hanging out with these people outside of school. As High School progressed, I got closer and closer to these people, and they ended up becoming some of my closest friends. Fortunately, almost all of us ended up going to the University of Georgia and still are extremely close to this day. To say I love these guys is an understatement; they made one of the biggest changes of my life, which I thought was one of the worst changes, one of the best things that has ever happened to me.