This semester at Her Campus U Mich, we’ve covered some pretty intimate topics. From break ups to antidepressants, you, our readers, have learned a lot about us. You’ve learned about our struggles, our triumphs, our ups, and our downs. You’re the public diary we couldn’t live without.
However, while my staff has done an amazing job of opening up to you, I have not. Throughout my time on Her Campus, I have written about the best movies to get you pumped for college, why being high maintenance isn’t such a bad thing, and, most emotional of all, my struggle to complete a sugar cleanse. Tear-jerking, I know. But as my first year of being Editor in Chief comes to an end, I thought I would take a page out of my incredible team’s book and let you in a little.
Last summer I went abroad to Dublin, Ireland. And I fell in love. Not with a boy, but with the city. I loved the Kopparberg cider, my local pub (shout out to you Doyle’s), and my insane roommates. I loved it so much I wanted to go back second semester, but I had a difficult choice to make. Become Her Campus’s next Editor in Chief, or go abroad. I guess you know which one I chose.
Over the past two and a half years, Her Campus became my passion, something I gave my everything to. And after searching for my place all over campus, I had finally found it here. Plus, I knew it would look great on my resume ;) But I would be lying if I hadn’t thought of my senior friends, especially my senior boyfriend of three years who I would be leaving behind if I left. And while they weren’t factors in my decision to stay in Ann Arbor, they were certainly big pluses.
However, just a few days after school started again in January and my three best friends left for their own abroad adventures, my boyfriend and I broke up. Great timing, right?
I had always thought that if I had to go through a break up, not to mention my first break up, I would have my best friends by my side to hug me and feed me and just let me know it would be all right. And they did. My best friends Emily and Rebecca were there for me, whether I was crying on their floors, gorging myself on froyo, or needing a nightly adventure. But getting through this without Alicia, Leslie, and Abbie was borderline impossible. After all, I had been there for their break ups; I wanted them to be there for mine. And to the best of their ability, they were.
But when push came to shove, they weren’t physically here and I had to figure this out mostly on my own, settling for half-drunk facetimes at obscene hours of the night, plans for phone calls a week in advance, and eight paragraph long emails to a mostly phone-less Alicia who was sailing around the world on Semester at Sea.
The thing was, after the first week, it wasn’t really about the break up. I had just never been this alone before. My boyfriend and I had started dating when I was in high school and had spent almost every day together since. I didn’t know how to fill my time, not to mention feed myself. My idea of cooking was burning eggs and making pasta, which gets old almost as fast as getting yelled at for buying overpriced salads at Revive (sorry Mom).
But after a class experiment opened the door into the world of cooking, I became obsessed. I cooked almost every night, spending hours in the kitchen and calling it procrasticooking. At least it was more productive than watching TV. I also started lifting weights, getting biceps even my dad was proud of, which, if you knew me and my previous inability to hold even my tiny dogs, was a pretty big change.
This semester, while hard without some of my closest and longest friends, gave me the opportunity to learn even more about myself than if this break up had happened any other semester. I made new friends, spent Galentine’s Day with some of my amazing Her Campus girls, and never passed up on a brunch opportunity. I spent all my money, went out way too much for someone who isn’t yet 21 (77 more days!), and fell in love with the person I am when I’m alone. And I don’t just mean the person I am single. I mean pajama-clad, binge watching the entire nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother in my bed on my unreal new mattress pad alone. And maybe I could have done these things even if my abroad friends had been here, but maybe not. At the end of the day I’ll never really know.
So as Alicia will be on a plane home tomorrow and my last paper is due Friday, I guess I can finally say that this incredibly hard and yet incredibly rewarding semester has come to an end. And now that I am here, all I can think is that I am so insanely, genuinely thankful. Thankful to my friends here, thankful to my friends abroad, thankful to my oven for not catching fire, thankful for my molten chocolate lava cake recipe, thankful for my writing teacher who helped me get here, and thankful to Her Campus. Without you, I never would have made it.