I was truly given an amazing life. First off, I had the privilege of growing up in a well-known and successful Connecticut town, with its comforting New England charm and loving feel. I have the sweetest and most protective older brother, like ever, and a truly remarkable older sister. My parents are still married and I have always looked at them with wide-open eyes, gaining the sense of what true and unconditional love is. Deeper than that, I had a warm and beautiful house my parents raised me in to protect me during the harsh winters, and beautiful beachy vacations in Cape Cod to welcome me to every summer.
Even further, growing up, I was basically given my best friend. She came guaranteed with my life. My dad grew up with hers, went through high school and college together as runners, the rest history. We even quit field hockey our sophomore and junior year to run on the cross-country team together, just like our dads. Our team went to the state open meet for the first time in 10 years the fall we began running together. I wouldn’t trade that experience we had together for anything. Frankie is essentially my token “life partner” and I am forever grateful to be given a best friend as loving and perfect as she is. I have never understood how I got so lucky.
And, I’m not done bragging yet… I had genuine and insanely close friends through every walk of life since elementary school to high school. The first girls I sat next to in 7th grade gym are still my four best friends from home and we are now seniors in college. They are like my family at this point.
Before my freshman year of college, I had everything and everyone that I needed. My amazing loving family, Frankie, my four best friends from school and my high school boyfriend who was essentially my world at the time (you can’t actually tell, but I’m rolling my eyes right now at that last mentioning.) I had my cozy grey-painted house on the corner of Montclair, the only home I had ever known that my dad worked my whole life to make every detail perfect for us. I never knew what it was like to truly struggle in relationships with the people around me or to struggle deeply with my life situation. I had never really “failed,” so to speak, in a relationship before or been genuinely unhappy with my life. And, how could I have?
When I started my freshman year, everything was fine. I was fine, I had only ever been fine. That September, I got along with my cheery roommate, I liked all of my suitemates and the pure excitement to start college blurred a lot of my underlying anxieties about this new stage of my life. I just never expected it to get so hard.
Around the time of October my first year of college, I started to feel differently. I had the scariest realization of my life up to that point: everything that was once incredibly stable in my life was no longer by my side. I was no longer in my sweet shoebox-sized room, 5 feet away from my brother and sister down the hall. My friends weren’t here. I was alone. I was also processing the awful fact of the matter that my first love, my first boyfriend, my first everything had just dumped me over a careless text message. My parents were now a grueling three-hour drive away, and being a freshman, I had nothing even close to a car to drive and see them for security. All of my best friends from home, Including Frankie, were all either still in high school or at completely different colleges. For the first time in my entire life, I didn’t feel at home. And for the first time, I wasn’t around people who felt like home.
The fall of my freshman year honed my darkest thoughts. I was incredibly lost without the security of my hometown, my family and my friends. Weekends spent at sleepovers staying up past two in the morning with my closest friends laughing about childhood stupidities were suddenly replaced by sweaty frat parties with people who made me feel like I needed to “prove” myself. Freshman year felt like a year-long surface-level conversation and it almost drove me insane because of my immense disappointment and genuine sadness about how awful and unexpected it all was.
The real killer for me and my freshman year, however, had a four-letter name and a vape basically fitted into his hand. I was starting to make a real and comforting connection with my roommate and my suitemates until he had walked in with his unchangeable and disgusting behavior. This guy verbally abused me for practically the entire year. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own space. Not only was his mouth full of degrading comments towards me and the rest of all the girls I knew at school, but he also had no work ethic. I despised this. He would sleep in my own space until two in the afternoon but still had the complete audacity to talk down to me. I would spend most days after class crying into my pillowcase and calling my perfect mom, wishing I was anywhere but within 20 feet of this negative person I was basically forced to spend “the best years of my life” with. I never had to be around someone so off-putting before.
I essentially had no real friends at school. My girlfriends at school I had first made were in support of this extremely toxic person, so I shut myself out. I can say that I am proud of the fact that I never truly took his sh*t. I always saw him for who he was. A manipulator, an incredibly insecure man, and someone I absolutely did not need to know for even a second longer than I did.
Nothing could have prepared me with this difficult life situation. I was completely blindsided by how awful the world can be when you are no longer with the familiar and the comforting. My freshman year, in my eyes, was a complete failure. And in turn, I saw myself as an even bigger failure.
For the first time in my life, I was not immediately presented a perfect friendship, a comfortable living situation and people who truly loved me and had my back. I think instead, I was presented with a hidden opportunity to grow and learn about how much life can really suck when you are not just handed the good parts of your life.
I wish I could hug freshman year Hannah. She was merely a shell of a girl, she just wanted to go home and she lost herself the first time she was on her own. I knew myself, before college, as the girl with amazing family friends, loving family members and someone who was always grounded and fulfilled. I didn’t know who I was without the people who had made up my life the previous 18 years.
In time, lots of time, I found that everything happened the way it needed to even if it was lonely and painful for a little. It was time for me to dig deeper and to push myself to find the silver lining of everything I went through, and everything I felt I had lost.
I was then, to my insanely good luck, met with one more crushing failure. I worked the entire summer to afford to be in a sorority, and I went through formal recruitment the early fall of my sophomore year. Okay, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t end up joining any of the sororities because, again, I didn’t feel a great connection with the people I was meeting during the process. Or at least I thought I wasn’t making any lasting connections.
Standing next to me, curly-haired with fun blue earrings, was Kella. And little did I know, she would shortly become one of the closest and most special friends I’ll ever make. She was like a beacon of hope, a new start, what I needed most at that time. She was completely different than any person I had met at a school I had already been at for an entire year.
It did not take long at all for Kella and I to become best friends at school, and for me to become extremely close with her friends who from day one welcomed me with huge belly laughs, open arms and true and genuine understanding of what I had gone through before meeting them. Something truly beautiful and irreplaceable grew from my struggle to put myself out there and to really connect with people in a new and previously-daunting place.
Kella, and the girls who came along with her (Miranda, Emma and Leah) are still my closest friends in college, three whole years and a million unforgettable memories made every day later. I wouldn’t trade long talks on our huge brown couch, all the Mama Mia dance parties or crazy inside jokes for anything.
I think the biggest lesson I learned during the beginning of college is that good things come to those who wait and that sometimes you need to go through a difficult situation to grow and learn from the discomfort. I had the complete luxury of never truly living in an uncomfortable situation growing up.
I was extremely content and protected by my privilege to grow up having a sleepover every Saturday with Frankie and her sister Josie, their dad bringing us to our favorite bagel place every time. I was lucky to have the same four best friends notice even a slight change in my mood, driving over so I could cry to them on my couch. And my parents, they worked their entire lives to give me everything that they could. It was finally my turn to work and actually struggle for the things I wanted.
I’m glad my life turned out the way they did and I am grateful for the lessons my hard freshman year presented me. I see that toxic person from my first college living situation in quick moments at the bar, but he does not bother me anymore. I am stronger because of everything that happened and I can now talk to new college students, comforting them in knowing that everything does not always come easy at first, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you need to fail, a little, to work for what you truly need in your life.