Coming into college as a freshman, I had one main concern. What if I don’t find my people? Since I come from a very close group of friends from back home, I already knew that it would be hard to close the last chapter of my life. What if I didn’t find the right people to help me start flipping through the next one? And I did struggle to find them. I struggled for a while, actually. But right before I gave up, I found them.
During my first few weeks at the College of Charleston, I couldn’t have been happier. I had found my best friend. We were the only two girls out of our suitemates that hadn’t dropped out of sorority recruitment, so we bonded right away. I went about my first semester happy, however, something always felt like it was missing. Every time my best friend and I felt that emptiness we knew exactly what it was. I’ll get straight to the point. We didn’t have friends. Although each other was enough, we wanted to share our laughter and good times with more people like us. At the end of the first semester, I told her, “This is normal for the first semester. We’ll find our people when we come back after the break.”
Well, a few weeks after arriving back to Charleston for the second semester, I began to disbelieve my own words. Why hadn’t we found them yet? I find that I don’t want to be anywhere else, but is Charleston the place for me? These are the questions that tossed me into the funk I was in the whole first month of the second semester. Every weekend, we grew sadder and frustrated that we still hadn’t found our people to share our new chapter with.
One day, I texted a new friend and asked her if she had any friends looking for additional roommates for the following school year. Surprisingly, she said she did. That night, we met up with two girls in the same boat as us. We watched the Superbowl together and the rest is history. Right when I thought they would never come along, they did. Don’t give up on finding your people.