Different paths in life require a new version of yourself
Opinion
By
Dorcas Mbugua
| Nov 16, 2025
If you’re a teenager in high school, I take no pleasure in being the bearer of this news: your parents are right (about a lot of things), but especially if they’ve told you that your high school friends may no longer feature in your life after you have all sat your final exams, and especially if you are looking to study abroad.
I remember with stunning clarity my parents telling me not to place too much weight on my high school friendships because they would come to an end when we all diverged to our tertiary education institutions.
That concept alone, the fact that friendships could end, was hearsay parallel to witchcraft and I was entirely unable and unwilling to consider any such reality and so I came to a silent verdict that my parents’ generation consisted mostly of aliens who understood very little regarding my kind. Obviously, now with the benefit of hindsight, that was clearer than my bespectacled teenage face; my parents were right. I have friends I was very close with in high school that I have never laid eyes on since our final papers in 2007.
I’m lucky that some friendships from high school and even primary school have survived space and time, but I think it’s crucial to consider that life as we know it during our high school years comes to an end when we exit those gates for the last time.
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Migrating abroad after high school is thrusting yourself into Adulting 101, but without a common syllabus. Depending on where you end up in the world, time difference and adult responsibilities take precedence and even the best laid reunion plans require a miracle.
Your summer is their winter, when they finally have time off, you can’t afford a ticket. This one has failed a paper and has to re-sit, that one is no longer responding in the group chat… and so the rift begins.
Just like that, life transports each of you to completely different paths, which require a new version of you, the version that will survive that chapter.
It therefore follows that if you are currently thinking about your future studies and plans, you must do so from a singular perspective and hinge your future on things that will never shift. Relationships shift, they change, they evolve and oftentimes, so do the participants.
If you hinge your future on a friendship and the nature of that friendship is altered, the trajectory of your life could also be altered – that’s too high a price to pay.
The same applies if you choose to study a course influenced by anything other than your own talents and interests.
I get it, we mind each other’s business in Africa. As we do so, we should be alive to the fact that everything changes.
Any decision related to your ability to thrive as a human being should never be hinged on things outside your control.
I am beginning to learn that the quality of life will be directly proportional to how well we learn to deal with the things outside our control.
The writer is a lawyer and podcaster in Nairobi