Accepting and embracing independence is a step everyone must take. Some people welcome it; some shudder at the thought. Despite it being a universal experience, it does take some courage to accomplish, and it’s never easy. Especially now, in a college setting, everywhere you look people are growing into a more independent version of themselves. Yes, our primary responsibility in college is to gain an education in the form of a degree, but we also learn so much beyond our professors’ lesson plans. Figuring out how to carry ourselves without the guidance of a parent, sibling or any kind of authority is more complex than people make it out to be.
I always thought independence is the act of leaving your parents’ home and managing to keep yourself afloat. I now know it’s much more complex than that. It’s letting go of the safety net your parents have metaphorically carried beneath you your whole life. I am lucky enough to have parents who still provide me with more emotional support than I could ever ask for, but I don’t go home to them every day, they can’t solve the solution to a problem they were never involved in. And so, then I think, independence must be navigating my way through those problems on my own. But I’ve noticed some of my friends have not made that shift yet. And of course, everyone makes their personal journeys at their own pace and there’s nothing wrong with that. But, unfortunately for a lot of them, their parents didn’t hold the safety net beneath them, they swaddled them in it, so how are they expected to navigate these problems on their own?
Because of that, some friends refuse to work towards their independence since they don’t know any better. This is where a self-made support system comes in. As friends, it is our duty to be there for each other whenever times get tough, whether that be struggling with growing up, mental health or anything in between. It is necessary to have these support groups, beyond just your family, so that you can gain different perspectives and advice. It’s so important to be present with your friends when they need you, even if it’s just listening because struggling by yourself never gets you very far and can lead to a downfall; that’s become a priority of mine for my friends who are having a hard time recognizing their independence. But when that support is met with stubbornness and refusal to accept it, the instinct is to retract it. It is so crucial to have an open mind not only when accepting help, but when offering help as well, otherwise nobody would ever have growth.
So maybe gaining independence isn’t learning to hold your own safety net but learning how to find the right people to help you stabilize it beneath you. Because if support systems are as important as I have made them seem, are we ever truly independent? I think independence isn’t the lack of reliance on anyone but understanding how much you can rely on yourself, before needing aid from someone you trust. And the amount of self-reliance that you can tolerate will change all the time as different circumstances come and go but balancing that tolerance and acknowledging the changes of that tolerance is definitely a step in the right direction.
So, as I was observing the different levels of independence that each of my friends has, I realized I have no right to measure their independence by my own standards because independence means something different to everyone. My independence is all about my little tolerance theory but my friend’s independence might be defined through actions, and that’s kind of the whole point—their standards don’t depend on mine. What I thought was going to be a journey of figuring out how to aid others who I had observed as ‘less’ independent than me, ended up being a lesson that my friends don’t owe me a spot in their journey to defining their own independence. What they need from me is unbiased support, and only my opinion when it is asked for. There is no universal ‘deeper understanding’ of independence as the title of this article suggests, what needs to be accepted is the differences in everyone’s definition of it.
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