I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
“Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”
Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.
Particularly devastating when you reflect on a lack of success after following this advice because now you can no longer think you were a victim of unfair circumstance or something external, but rather, you are , at your very core, just unlikeable. After all, you were yourself and it turned out nobody liked you.
That said, I think it’s only bad advice in as much as it’s glib and shallow, but I can’t exactly fault it per-se. I mean, I can’t really say the inverse is particularly healthy either. We’d think an adult telling a child specifically not be themselves would be pretty fucked up, but in any case, it’s just horrible advice to give because it doesn’t prescribe any actual changes one can enact that would result in a different outcome and the advice is insidious because of the implications for the any lack of success you encounter when following it. The other problem is that, you were already being yourself when you sought the advice, and you mostly can’t really help but be yourself even when trying not to because you ultimately become yourself trying to be someone else rather than someone else and that doesn’t doesn’t tend to work very well since if you could have been someone else you probably would be them rather than yourself given how much being yourself has sucked of late.
While I hate that advice though, I can see why it’s tempting to give and also how tricky it is to have anything useful to say, especially to a child in school. School is such a hellish jungle. It’s an environment so ripe for cruelty and all the worst of human nature at the very worst time for people to be exposed to it and there’s so little one can say that really does help because it’s such an inherently difficult situation to do anything about. You have to be there for years, you can’t rely on any level of maturity at all because the perpetrators of the cruelty are often your peers who are children, none of the adult world’s methods of navigating this type of situation are really applicable and the whole institution breeds an environment where this type of thing is such a regular occurrence that the best, kindest and most well meaning staff have to build a kind of immunity to it or risk emotional collapse from empathy for all the children that go through this every year and then you have the staff who are not good people, who don’t have empathy and are perpetrators of the cruelty itself whilst charged with the care of the children. This turned in to a big ramble, but yeh, school, fuck school man.
I’m 33 now, I don’t remember my sleepovers and all of my highschool friends are gone. We see each other every now and then when it’s convenient, but the new friends I made late 20s are the people closest to who I am now.
You aren’t “missing out” and feeling like you are is only going to make your confidence issues worse. High school is not what defines who you are.
You have the power to feel confident by altering your estimate of pleasing people. Please yourself, confidence and everything else you feel you want will come much easier. Good luck!