The thing movies lie about highschool

So I'm in college, but recently I've been thinking about high school, mostly because I miss the Biden Administration. But one thing I remember about high school that made me realize the movies and tv lie about is popularity.

Literally, popularity doesn't exist. The thing was is that respect (which is popularity) was based on entirely different things. We didn't even call it "being popular" we called it "being respected". Here's why. The more respect you had, the less likely you were to get bullied, same with popularity. But the thing was is that no one except two people that I know of ever kept the same amount of respect through all 4 years. It changed.

People fell from grace, people rose in the ranks, and guess what, because of that, there was no set "popular" group. We all just kind of agreed like "okay, better not fuck with them." Context, I went to the school with the least funding in my town. The building was falling apart one way or another, and many kids were living in poverty or were straight up homeless.

So, at my school, the way you were respected wasn't based one what sport you played, or how good you looked, or how much money you had, it was based on if you could win a fight. And that encompassed both physical and verbal fights.

So people were moving up and down the ranks constantly. The only way, you were treated with respect without getting into fights is if you were the type of kid everybody thought would shoot up the school. And it was pretty easy to tell who would do it so those kids were treated nicely, never bullied, and always given respect because nobody knew if or when they were gonna snap.

My personal experience was being the trans kid who would destroy your ego with words and you couldn't fight me because I wouldn't fight back and therefore, I wasn't the one getting in trouble. Seriously, I broke people's minds, sometimes left them speechless because I used a mix of psychological torture and therapy talk.

People genuinely did not want to make me mad, so I had respect. But I wasn't at the top of the leader board, and I had my times where I would fall.

TLDR, popularity isn't a real thing when you actually think about it. People move up and down the respect line and hey, maybe some kid will finally experience ego death. But no one is treated as royalty, not even at prom.

This isn't mean girls, this is the real world. And in this not so great nation we call America, the only thing that matters is surviving. Plus, when you get out into the real world, you start to realize that the people in power right now, were not respected in high school, and they're trying to fill a fantasy void. Literally, look at Donald trump and try to convince me that he was the smartest mother fucker in class. Because I bet you 100%, that fucking alien had nothing going for him except money.

Anyways, that's my rant about "popularity" and how fucking fake it is. Seriously, no one goes through all 4 years of high school permanently at the top.

ALso stop using the word popular to describe someone at your school, because once again, it's fake, doesn't matter, and you're feeding into their ego. ANd do you really wanna do that, do you want to give someoen who's being a big bitch to you satisfaction, no.