The things you learn growing up in a small town are different to when you spend your informative years in a city. Growing up in a small town is something not everyone gets to experience. While it has quite a few disadvantages (especially if your small town is in the country) it also has some advantages, like a close knit community, lifelong friends, and trust. Small town living is something you've got to experience to truly understand. Below are 4 lessons I've learned from growing up in a small town.
giphy.com Remember that night when you had to leave the party early because you had a little too much to drink and your nerdy neighbor was so nice to offer you a lift home? Next day in school this act of kindness was turned into the event of you having a new boyfriend.
When you grew up in a small town you know exactly what I'm talking about. The best kind of gossip is the one about people you know and growing up in a small town means knowing almost everything about everyone.
Small town gossip is gossip at its best.
Everyone loves gossip and everyone loves gossiping as long as one is not involved in it.
You coming from a small town will teach you to not pay too much attention to it, because it can always backfire on you.
giphy.com In a small town there's not really that much to do. No night clubs and if there was one you wouldn't dare go there because all the weirdos hung around there. There was a limited amount of bars where you wouldn't go, because you probably would have run into your aunt or uncle.
So sitting by the riverbank with all your friends was the only place to go and it also was your favorite place to go. You had so much fun just sitting in the middle of nowhere. Now that you're in the big city, you and your colleagues go to the hippest bars after work.
While your colleagues always wonder why those places are so boring, you being from a small town will know the answer to that: because it's not the place that brings the fun but the people you're with.
giphy.com Growing up in a small town means dealing with all kinds of different points of view and opinions of people. The problem: there wasn't really any chance of escaping those views about life, beliefs or on the way you should be living.
In a big city you just walk away if somebody is trying to educate you in a kind of way that doesn't suit you. In a small town this isn't that simple.
If an older person was wrong it was considered very rude to proof him so. You had no choice - you had to listen.
You might not recognize this yet, but being able to give up the need of being right leads to much more communication, you will learn to listen, and you will learn how the minds of other people work.
giphy.com This might sound very cliché, but if you were part of the outsiders during your small town high school years you are well prepared to deal with the narrow-mindedness of people which you will find everywhere no matter where you will go.
This is priceless.
From a very early age you were trained to fight for what you believed in, therefore you won't have problems to defend yourself and your opinions in front of others.
Also you probably will not tend to judge people that quickly, because you know what it feels like being judged too quickly.
Did you grow up in a small town? What are your pros and cons?