My Experience with Cancel Culture

Ten years ago, I tried to cancel a classmate.

High school was almost ten years ago, but I’m still processing it. I might be in the minority, but I loved middle school but hated high school. High school was so terrible that I didn’t recognize its severity until I got out. I have spent the time since working to forgive some of my classmates and teachers.
The more I process, the more I recognize that I was not always in the right. In high school, I tried to cancel someone.

Let’s call this person Hailey. My friends and I called Hailey the floater. She wanted to be a part of the cool crowd, but the popular girls didn’t accept her, so Hailey butted in and invited herself. Her family was wealthy, and she had a pool; none of the other popular girls had a pool, so they kept Hailey around partly for the perks.

Hailey obsessed over boys and wanted to be in a relationship. She flirted with every potential mate in our class, at one point, “stealing” the queen bee’s high school sweetheart. In a class where the ratio of men to women was 2:1, it was easy to become likable by a majority of the grade with this strategy.

I interacted most with Hailey through volleyball. We both played for the school team…and we both played the same position. Long story short, I became a frenemy with Hailey because she took my spot in my sport.

The fall of our senior year, Hailey and some of the football players got in trouble for smoking hookah. The school…