I never thought coming back to Kenyon could be this hard.
At the end of last year, a graduating senior friend told me about how rough the start to his sophomore year was and how he had to reconfigure his friends a lot. I totally listened, but I truly felt like my relationships with my friends were so strong that it would never happen to me.
Yet, when we returned to campus a little over a week ago, things felt super different. For the first time at Kenyon, I felt really, truly alone. I found myself just sitting in my room not sure who to text. Over the past week, I’ve had scary anxiety attacks over-thinking how I don’t know who I can sit with at dinner. I sat alone in my dorm last Saturday because I literally didn’t know who to call to go out with.
So, what happened?
Nothing drastic or scary, luckily. It’s not like a bunch of my friends and I had a huge fallout over the summer. And I don’t think (see: sincerely hope) that I became intolerable to be around.
We simply just don’t live right next to each other anymore. Last year, 90% of my friend group lived somewhere in the same residence hall. We hung out in a little room off the main lounge, and at pretty much any time of the day, one or more of us was bound to be there. It was easy to knock on someone’s door and go to lunch together because we all lived ten steps from each other. It was simpler.
But, now, we’ve become a diasporic population. Some of us live far, far north on campus and some live pretty far south. So, it’s not that we all just hate each other now; we just don’t live three doors down from each other. We don’t see each other every minute of every day. And, for some friendships, that lack of a convenience factor may cause us to realize we don’t really have much in common and it was a tenuous, conditional relationship to begin with. Others of us will make it work.
Now, at the same moment where I’m sorting through my current friendships, my true hamartia lies in my inability to talk to new people. It surprises a lot of people to find out that I’m socially anxious because once you get to know me, I’m funny and talkative and convivial. However, talking to new people or people I’m not super close with really stresses me out to the point where I will take wrap-around paths to class to avoid conversation. So as the convenient friendships falter, I’m struggling to build those new bonds. I really won’t connect with new people unless someone who I already know is there to help initiate the conversation. It leads to my social pool narrowing without a chance to replenish itself. In general, I’m truly excited for sophomore year. I’m taking classes that I’m really excited about, and I feel more comfortable with who I am as a person than I did at this time in 2016. But, as someone who hates shifting social relationships, the idea of feeling alone is terrifying. What’s nice to know, however, is that I’m not the only person feeling this way. It’s a really common feeling and from almost everyone older who I’ve talked to, it eventually gets better. Things fall into place once this awkward transition is over. There is comfort in realizing I’m not alone in my loneliness.