To think this decision I made at 16 has ruined my life?

[SayItOnceAgain]

I'm currently nearly 30, for context. At 16 I was shy, but had a good group of friends and was well-liked amongst my peers. For some reason at 16 I decided I wanted a fresh start and to go to college rather than stay on at sixth form like nearly all of my classmates. All the adults in life say it would be the best thing for me, I'd grow in confidence and make lots of new friends. I went to college and it was awful. I didn't click with anyone, there were lots of mature students who had children or degrees and were retraining. I was a very young, naive 16 year old and couldn't form any friendships. I spent 2 years being so, so lonely. I'd spend lunch times hiding in the toilets or on the phone to my older sister in tears. I'd pray that I would fail my a-level exams so I had an excuse to drop out. It really impacted my self-esteem as it was the first time in my life having no friends. It led me to feel like nobody would ever want to be friends with me and I was destined to be a loner - and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy as at university and most jobs I've not made any friends.

In the meantime, everyone who stayed on at sixth form seemed to grow closer and form a big, close-knit friendship group. Fast forward to now and many of them have married or got engaged to each other within this group, there's now baby showers and bridal showers and housewarming parties. I feel so stunted compared to them. I have no friends, never been in a relationship. It felt like we were all on the same path until that decision to go to college. I've had so many years to make up for it and try catch up with them, but I just can't. I know I can't really blame it all on college, but it seemed like that was the start of things going down hill.

It sounds like your life would have been different if you'd stayed at 6th form, but there's no guarantee it would have been better.
It's not too late, can you get back in touch with your old friends, join some clubs, make friends online? Maybe you need some support and therapy to help explore these feelings and find a way to move forward. You are still young and there is time to make friends etc but maybe you need some support learning how to do that. After school, making friends can be hard, but it is possible. Good luck 🤞

Don’t ket your 16 year old self define who are you are today. Life is for going forward, not looking back.

you choosing this to ruin your life but there’s no reason why it should. Move on.

Goodness, that sounds stifling -- the group who have stayed joined at the hip from school and are busily intermarrying, not you!

Why aren't they spreading their wings and making fresh relationships?

I know someone who took the path you didn't and they still didn't marry, all the friends married each other but not them. You don't know how things would have worked out but looking back is stopping you from living in the present now. Give counselling a go, get some help to work through these issues, so you can properly live for yourself in the moment.

I genuinely wouldn't be jealous of a group of friends all ending up partnered up within that group- it's a little weird and claustrophobic.

My friendship group also split at 16 with most of my school friends going to a different college. Like you, the one I went to had more of a mixture of people, I was lucky and found my small group.

But you can do something about it now! No-one's the same person they were as a teenager. Definitely stop dwelling on this one point in time, which sounds like a few bits of bad luck and self- esteem collided. Your future is still starting.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Stop wasting time and energy on pointless regrets. Instead take time to evaluate what you can do now to improve your life.
Your happiness is in your own hands!

This ^

I don't think the decision to go to college has caused the problem here. If you had strong friendships with your school friends, going to a different college would have made no difference - you would have remained close to them. From the fact that this didn't happen, and the fact that everyone suggested a new start at college would give you confidence etc, I am pretty sure things are school were not as rosy as it now seems.

It is fairly clear that you have social anxiety, and also that this is an aspect of your personality and not caused by one choice when you were 16. The best thing to do is to seek help for this, so you can move forward more happily - you are only 29 so you can still have all the things you want if you take control of your future instead of ruminating about the past.

Absolutely this! You don’t have to be defined by something from 16 years ago. It’s never too late! I was a loner at school for various reasons. Spent a lot of time in the library or hiding in toilets. I was also a late bloomer when it came to relationships. I’m now in my late 30s, happily married and with DC. I’m not in contact with anybody from school and don’t want to be. There’s nothing stopping you building up what you lacked at 16. Try not to carry shame around something that could have happened to anyone and look for what options are open to you!

It must be a sign of me getting a little bit older, but I think you're catastrophising massively here. You're still very young, the world is your oyster. It sounds like you're feeling like you're in a rut atm but accept that's all it is. Temporary low mood. From your OP it doesn't sound like you've made any terrible decisions at all.

Total catastrophising. So many people emigrate much later or move around the world. You need helo for your anxiety.

I am in my 50s and still making friends. I will never stop.

It's easy to know with hindsight that you would have probably been better off staying at your school for sixth form. But you didn't know that, you followed the advice of adults.

You can't turn the clock back though so don't beat yourself up about it.

I'm going to try and say this gently, OP.

No, I don't think your decision to go to sixth form college has ruined your life. I think there has to be something more to it.

Even if you were unhappy from 16 to 18, that's over a decade ago now. What have you been doing since then?

I think it is quite unusual for a group of friends from 6th form to still be so close at 30 and for some of them to be married to each other. That's not most people's experience. I had a great time at 6th form and have stayed in touch with a handful of friends, two of whom are now married to each other, but that's it. Most of the friends I have now are people I met at or after university.

I can understand the temptation to think that if only you'd made a different decision at 16 your whole life would have turned out differently. But I don't think that's true. If such a minor thing as going to a different 6th form was enough to derail your life, I think the likelihood is something else would have derailed your life instead if you had stayed on.

I think you could benefit from seeing a therapist to try and figure out the real root cause of this, why you haven't managed to get your life back on track since then, and what you can do about it now.

30 is still pretty young. You have most of your life still ahead of you and you do have time to turn things around. But you need to do some serious work on your self esteem.

I really feel for you OP as I changed school at 14 and it was a horrible mistake. It might be worth considering counselling?

Loads of schools don't even have sixth forms ,
I'm.sorry you didn't have a good time at college ,but lots of people move on naturally at 16 and 18
You can't blsmecgoing to.a different college at 16 for how your life has worked out
Fwiw I can't imagine how boring it would be to stay with the same group of friends from 16 and couple up ,i have friends from all stages of my life..

All the adults in life say it would be the best thing for me, I'd grow in confidence and make lots of new friends. I went to college and it was awful. I didn't click with anyone, there were lots of mature students who had children or degrees and were retraining. I was a very young, naive 16 year old and couldn't form any friendships. I spent 2 years being so, so lonely. I'd spend lunch times hiding in the toilets or on the phone to my older sister in tears.

I really relate to this. I didn’t have your exact situation, but all throughout high school in the US, my teachers told me I was going to just love college (the US definition of college). I was going to just flourish there and make so many friends and “find my people,” and…no, I didn’t. I’d gone to the same small private school since I was five, and although there were some social aspects of college I liked, most of the people there seemed to have really different value systems. I went to law school after college, where, like you, I was around a lot of more mature students with more life experience. I felt so intimidated - like a toddler who got plunked down in a class of eight-year-olds and had to fool everyone into thinking she was an eight-year-old too. I’m 37 and I feel like I socially stalled in college. I don’t know how to make friends outside of a school structure.

I don’t think you or I ruined our lives, but it’s tough.

I had a similar situation and left a stable environment for a far less one just after GCSE's when I was 16. Got far worse A Levels than I had been expected in the previous place, fell into bad habits and had little supervision or protection from the parent I had been sent to live with. I feel like my personality changed a lot over these 2/3 years. By having to fend for myself and "fit in" I became more socially aware than most at that age. I think in hindsight some would say I had been corrupted/abused by a few people and it has impacted how I see the world, for sure.

However, that being said I realised I was the master of my own fate, kept moving forwards and moved out of that parental house and lack of "support" at 18. I do often feel I should have done better, feel that I didn't use my potential, which is hard to realise and put to bed. However, I have seen successful people feel miserable because they have no social skills/ social people depressed they have no career/ mothers be sad because they worked through their kids' childhoods/mothers who gave up careers to be childminders for their kids feeling lost... Life is really what choices you make but how you frame that to yourself is what matters. We all do the best with the options we are given at any one time. Once you see that and can put the "what ifs" to bed, you'll be happier. In my opinion it's the hindsight's version of comparing yourself to others - it can never be, so the only way forward is to make the most of what you have or make better decisions moving forward.

Its very easy to blame one incident for your entire life turning out shit. But don't. What are you doing to make friends?
Are you joining groups
Taking up hobbies
Inviting people in your workplace for coffee or lunch
Joining Meetup

Because I do all these.

You're condemning the rest of your life based on a mountain of what-ifs.

Seconding this! OP, there is a whole world out there and 30 is so young. In the words of Drake "Past behind us like a ponytail". Leave the past in the past.

I was in a group like that - ended up as one of the coupled up people, but when I dumped the boyfriend at 22, I got ostracized and kicked out of the group! Now we're nearing 40 and they're all still coupled up, still the same social circle and many of them still live and work in my home town. They seem happy enough, but it's not for me.

The fact you went into other settings and still didn't form connections suggests it's nothing to do with the college and everything to do with you. What kinds of friends do you want? What do you do to find these people? I feel a bit like you, I have acquaintances everywhere I go but no 'people' but actually thats me and I find maintaining friendships exhausting. I think you need to reflect on what YOU want not what you don't have in comparison to your school friends.

Agree with this.

also, you feel stuck but you really do have the power to change things. Start by making one change today

Exactly! You're talking as if the rest of your life is now determined. I also had no confidence when I did my a-levels. It was pure hell. I skipped lessons or sat in class completely mute. I barely spoke to anyone at college for two years. My confidence dwindled away to nothing. But I've moved on. I rebuilt my confidence, made new friends. It seems like your old school friends haven't really spread their wings if their lives are still so entwined. I mean it's nice in some ways but also rather unusual. Nearly everyone from my home town moved away and made new lives for themselves.
And also school friendships are usually established before 6th form. I'm still friends with people who went to primary school or who I met at secondary school. Surely if you had good friends at school you would have remained friends with them despite you moving to college.
I think you're really obsessing about this so called "mistake". It's done, it's over. Look to the future. Look at rebuilding your confidence and making new friends. It's hard and it takes effort but it's perfectly doable. You're only 29!

See I think we remember things differently to how other people remember them- if you chose to go that way there must have been a reason at the time- as in the reason it came up for you to even have to make that decision? Either way you are still so young! I’d agree not to be thinking about it too much x