Adronitis. The frustrating feelings that accompany the dreadful first few weeks of getting to know someone. The monotonous “What’s your name? What hall are you in? Oh cool. What are you studying? Nice.” follows the painful few seconds of awkward silence before you part ways indefinitely. The first few days after my parents dropped me off in my little college dorm, thousands of miles from home, I was in denial. If you had told my younger self that I was studying abroad in a tiny golf town on the East Coast of Scotland, I wouldn’t have believed it.
The idea of beginning again, with entirely different people– seemed like a tempting invitation to reinvent myself. The summer before I left home for university consisted of uninterrupted daydreaming, excitement, fear, and denial wrapped together with the looming anxiety of making friends. As most first-years probably were, I was sh*tting my pants. At the same time, I doted on my newfound independence. I was buying my own groceries and forgetting to throw out the sour milk gone bad, travelling without having to arrive at the airport 6 hours earlier, curfew– a far-flung concept. I wanted to feel like an adult so badly that the simplicities of growing up slipped away somewhere remote, existing only as a memory. As the weeks continued, I was met with the horrors of circuit laundry, lugging my overpriced groceries back to my flat, and, worst of all, making small talk.
I had never been good at making small talk—which put me at a severe disadvantage during the first few weeks of my first year. Personally, I don’t consider myself to be an awkward person. Still, when you throw me into a horde of extroverts and plastic cups swashing with vodka cranberry, my only choice is to muster up the sentence I very quickly memorised within the first day of my arrival. “So, what are you studying?”
Making genuine friendships at university was not as easy as I was fooled into believing. It was a skill that demanded practice and careful finetuning. I quickly realised that it would take much more than simply exchanging pleasantries. I had been so accustomed to the same people I went to school with for the past four years that entering university– I felt I was losing a game of snakes and ladders. Why wasn’t making friends as straightforward as it used to be, where the currency for acceptance was asking to play outside?
You would think it would be easier to make friends entering college as everyone was beginning again. In a way, it gave me comfort to know deep down, we were all desperately searching for the same thing. A connection that brings us back to ourselves amidst all the chaos of adjusting to our shiny, brand-new lives. There was just one exhausting problem. The amount of time it took to truly become comfortable with someone. Having to peel back each layer—every complexity of a person, until you’ve finally reached the core of who they really are.
Over time, without realising it, you’re beginning to feel like yourself again. You’re not thinking about the next thing you’ll say or how it might sound. You are fourteen again, laughing so hard your stomach aches. You feel at ease—the kind of comfort where even silence translates as a language of love. Although there’s no catalyst for friendships (at least not one that I know of), it undoubtedly gets better. The awkward limbo between acquaintances and friends can feel like a lifetime– but if you manage to claw your way to the other side, you may meet the people who make you feel at home again.