This past weekend, I celebrated my twentieth birthday.
I had planned a big spectacle of a night: my friends would all be invited to my room for a huge slumber party. We would watch movies. We would wear face masks and eat trashy foods and play a bunch of board games. The plan was to basically hold a middle-school sleepover in my college dorm.
The night only followed a few of these plans.
We played board games and ate some trashy foods, but we never got around to the face masks and the movies and the mattresses on the floor of my common room.
Something similar happened last year, too: my friends threw me a small get-together in one of their rooms and we reached some silently agreed-upon point in the night in which we all went back to our respective beds and called it a night.
This has fascinated me immensely in my (almost) two years at Kenyon. College friends and home friends are immensely different. We can love them similarly, I’m sure, but we, without a doubt, love them in incredibly different ways.
One example of this is that, for some college students, people meet and have fun with them via drinking. Drinking is deeply tied to social life at Kenyon, so it makes sense that it shapes the interactions that people have here. Maybe some people can connect this to their home lives, but it’s markedly absent in my home life with my closest friend group. When I’m home, I’m more likely to sit with my friends and watch TV aimlessly. It doesn’t have the structure it requires here (“I don’t have lab until 1, do you want to go watch an episode of Game of Thrones?”). I’m also Latina, so, despite my turning twenty years old, I still feel the need to respect my mother’s rules when I’m staying under her roof; I try to be in at a reasonable time most nights, and I certainly don’t do anything illegal.
It doesn’t really surprise me that my college life is distinct from my home life. That’s a normal college student experience. It’s a normal first-generation college student experience.
But I didn’t expect the relationships I had with my friends (and how I celebrated them) to differ so greatly. After my birthday, I’ve felt an immense displacement. I have dreams every few weeks wherein my friends from home and school meet in some neutral setting, and it’s the happiest I can picture myself being—but it’s not a realistic possibility for the future.
What friends will I hold five or ten years from now? How will they differ from the friends I have now?
I cannot pretend to know. I am trying to become much more comfortable with the experiences I share with people here. I miss home a lot, but I also know that I would never get to go to a party and wear mini cowboy hats on top of my hair buns on my birthday. I wouldn’t be able to wake up the next morning and eat a horrendously big brunch with my friends. I wouldn’t be able to write this article.
I am trying to find comfort in the similarities. I am trying to find excitement and joy within the discoveries. I think that that’s the best I can hope for.
Image Credits: Feature, 1, 2, 3