Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Do you feel like your “popularity” or “success” in highschool translated to adulthood?

For many years, one of my personal mantras has been “anybody who says that high school is the best years of their life has never been to college”

As for myself, no, I don’t think that my “popularity“ or “success“ from high school translated into college. At all. I graduated in the body 50% of my class and then I’ll becoming a high school teacher. Just because I wasn’t academic successful in school doesn’t mean that I wasn’t passionate about reading and writing.

My social life was practically nonexistent in high school. To say that I was a late bloomer is a gross understatement. I feel like I really did not truly come into my own until I reached college. 

I absolutely do not think that high school popularity or high school success translates into adulthood. Sometimes, somebody decides to stay in the town that they’ve lived in their entire lives and never leave. Even then, they would have to be something of legend in their high school and really parlay that into some sense of celebrity in their hometown.

While I think these kinds of things could still happen, every once in a while, it’s probably more the stuff of movies than it is a real life. I simply refuse to believe that anyone really gives a shit about your former high school glory decades later, here today in 2025.

But that’s what’s so great about the whole college experience or the work experience, the military experience – post high school life in general. High school is an important moment in a young person’s life, and graduating from high school is the pinnacle of that achievement. But high school is just the beginning. It’s the first step of the journey. I’m sorry if I’m sounding really melodramatic about this. But this has been on my mind a lot lately, especially with kid 1 having graduated last month.

When I was teaching in South Carolina, I remember seeing one of my student’s signing another students yearbook one of the things they said to them was “don’t be a townie“. That kind of hit me pretty hard. I was impressed to see that even some of my students who consider their little corner of South Carolina to be the center of the universe wanted desperately not to get out of town, but to see their peers get out of there as well.

Kid 1 going to be attending school in Wisconsin this fall. And while I am proud of everything, he is achieved up to this point, I know that he has no idea of what’s in store for him over the next four years. He is going to see things and experiencing things that quite frankly he cannot imagine. I tried to tell that to him in a letter I wrote to him after graduation. 

So well, I think that success in high school is something you can carry on with you into the next phase of your life, the “popularity” you have attained as a high schooler means nothing in the real world.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts

• Rob’s Retro Movie Review: This is Spinal Tap (1984) – The Movie That Scaled to Eleven
• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

AI generated art courtesy of Chat GPT

The article “glory days“ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob