There is an expectation amongst young people that no one will be mean or cruel or dislike you for no reason, ever. One of the most freeing things you can learn in your 20s is that you don't have to care about what people think.
Appreciate the conclusion
I appreciated the conclusion. While reading, I had the sense that the author had a very rough high school experience and was projecting that narrative onto everything else. None of the situations she described seemed unusual and the narratives she attached didn’t match what I would make of them.
The final paragraph of the author recognizing this for herself filled me with some feeling of relief.