I’m sitting on the train homeward bound, thinking about all the family dynamics and reunions that I’m about to encounter. In less than a month, my first semester of college will be over – that’s one eighth of my total college career!
Before becoming a college student, I had such high hopes for everything – the meaningful, enriching conversations I would have, people who I would become lifetime friends with, the liberty of being my own person and making decisions entirely on my own….
I applied to 16 (!!!) colleges and, if I’m being entirely honest, I wasn’t one hundred percent satisfied with the results. But by August, I had found peace with the prospect becoming a Red Devil. I still remember clearly how I actively sought out every new face I saw and how hard I tried to make jokes and laugh at the ones other people made. Just like everyone else, I was eager to find a new home after leaving my actual one.
Of course, I wrote my name down at every other table at the activity fair; I even tried ultimate frisbee, a sport that I later realized I could never be good at and should probably part with. I met interesting people; some of them became my friends and others drifted. I had classes that I had enjoyed from the beginning to the end, as well as ones that I absolutely detested. It’s only been three months but my heart has already been broken once. It wasn’t anything special, just a surprisingly uncreative story that could be best summarized by these four words: “we don’t talk anymore.”
If I could go back in time and have a conversation with the Julie from August 27th, I would just tell her to calm down and be patient. Her college experience isn’t going to be like the movies she saw in middle school, or the stories she had heard from her older friends. Her college experience is going to be a bit of everything. There will be moments of pure, over-the-top fun and massive self-destruction. She will make terrible decisions and spend days trying to understand what triggers her to do certain things. She will meet people whom she initially considered as “best friend material” and later had mixed feelings about. But at the end of the day, she will be fine.
I’ve already started to find my people at Dickinson. Yes, things were a little rough in the beginning. I was probably trying so hard that I almost merged the true me with whomever I wanted to be friends with. As things settled down and everyone calmed their anxiety, I gradually realized that I couldn’t be anyone else but myself. I can’t be friends with everyone and I most definitely can’t be friends with someone who only wants to be friends with me because of a façade I put up.
Maybe college hasn’t felt exactly home just yet, but it will in time.
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