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There is something liberating about finishing high school and making new friendships when entering new phases of your life, without having to revisit old relationships from school. Some of those alliances with schoolfriends came with an invisible ball and chain, and in my case finishing high school was my chance to sever ties. I haven't looked back since.

The times I've reconnected with school friends it has been through accidentally meeting them in a shopping mall with their kids or at church, since most of us stayed in the area since childhood. That is okay because if you want to resume a friendship, you can see what things you might have in common with them and if one suggests meeting again, you can agree or find ways to avoid future contact with the person. With some I have reconnected and we did continue our friendship, but we're not lifelong friends, we just continued the acquaintance at a safe distance.

MySpace and Facebook might be praised as new systems that help reconnect young people with their schoolfriends, but I think people should be careful. If you really liked one another's company at school, then you would not have allowed yourselves to lose contact at all. From my experience, the kids who enjoyed each other's company stayed friends as adults. By letting them go, you may have subconsciously severed ties for a reason. Would you really want to do that to yourself again and have them in your life all over again? I know I wouldn't, I'm happy to leave them behind.

On my last day of high school 25 years ago, I took one last look at the building, inhaled and exhaled and started walking away from the school, never looking back again. It was a turning point in my life, and I don't think I'll forget it unless I have amnesia or lose my memory to old age. I decided that I would put that time behind me, learn from my mistakes with education and try to make a success of my life. In some ways I have not achieved this goal, but in others I succeeded in ways I hadn't imagined. One of the most positive things to come out of finishing high school is 'losing' people I was shackled to at school, thinking they were my friends. Finishing meant that I wouldn't have to listen to their whining about their parents, their siblings, their grandparents, a teacher who marked their assignments/exams unfairly and robbed them of their marks, potential boyfriends. The list goes on...

In the following year, I completed a short business course and made new friends.

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