Happy, carefree faces lit up our childhood – friends, parents, teachers – but something happened when we hit middle and high school. The kindness was wrenched from some; others gave it away like spare change.

“Welcome to the real world,” they said. What happens in these few, precious teen years will affect us for the rest of our lives, and it seems that this gives everyone permission to knock others down in an attempt to build themselves up. Peers become our competition, our enemies. All the rules are thrown out the window. The world suddenly revolves around only one person: you.

Real friendships are a rarity. Friends used to be anyone who played the same game on the playground. Now, people with common interests are a dime a dozen.

So, I wonder, what happened to us? Yes, I'm talking to you: the high schooler, the jock, the brain, the beauty, the goth, the church kid. We like to pretend these titles don't exist; we pretend we all live in a happy little world, and everyone gets a fair share of everything. These titles don't just label us, they divide us.

These divides are excruciatingly difficult to cross, despite what TV shows and movies claim. We're all suckers for a happy ending – just admit it. If this is true, how come we fight the possibility of a happy ending so much? We don't want to cross the divides. The lines have been clearly drawn, but why?

Why can't we see that at the end of the day, we are all the same? Strip away our social exteriors and we're all identical. We all want to be loved and accepted. We all want a bright future, to shine our own light, not to live in another's shadow.

But what if we decide to share? Instead of trying to outshine others, lend them some of our light so they can shine too. We might just find that, suddenly, the world is much brighter.