The week before the start of my junior year might have been the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my whole life. I’m an overthinker, and I struggle with rumination. I overanalyze everything I feel and always think that everything will end in the worst way possible. I find myself in such a negative headspace which always leads to me being extremely worried and nervous about everything.
In the past few months, I’ve found that I’ve been alone more than ever before. I’m not really used to being alone with my thoughts for such a long period of time, and these solidary periods often left me digging myself into a hole of self-loathing and anxiety. There was nothing I could do to get the thoughts to stop, and whenever I tried to distract myself, I couldn’t seem to shake the idea that I had no one to talk to.
I would check social media and see people doing fun things with their friends, and in my bleak mood, I would wonder why I was sitting alone in a room when it seemed like all my peers were out living. It left me feeling like something was wrong with me or that I was wasting my life being alone with only my thoughts for company.
I thought solitude was my worst enemy. I loathed the way it made me feel. It was an inescapable dread, a persistent dull ache. I had never felt that way before, and my worry fueled my feelings further.
I was so used to having people that I could talk to all the time that when I suddenly didn’t have those connections, I didn’t know how to handle it on my own. This realization made me feel even worse. I thought that as a 20-year-old college student, a little alone time should have been something I craved, but instead, I was counting down the hours until school started just so I would have something to occupy my mind other than my own thoughts.
Ever since this happened, I decided to try and change my mentality. Instead of fearing the silence and solitude, I wanted to learn how to savor and appreciate it.
I had to confront my feelings. In these moments of seclusion, I couldn’t understand why I panicked so much. I had been by myself before, so why was this time any different? Looking back, I think I was scared of many things, and I still am. I wasn’t scared of being alone, but I was scared about what it meant.
My best friend is graduating this spring, and I will have to face my senior year without her. She has been in my life for almost ten years, and I have experienced many important milestones with her. I’ve never really let myself think about what it would be like after she had moved on. In a space alone, I was unexpectedly confronted with these thoughts, and I realized that this inescapable loneliness wouldn’t go away. It would be back with greater force in less than a year.
I haven’t had to think about what my life looks like without constantly seeing my friend. Doing things with her has become such an inherent part of my life, and I have grown so familiar with her presence. I have other friends, but at the time, it felt like they had deeper connections with their close friends, and I felt like my only connection was with the one person who would be moving on with her life.
I had no solution to these problems that surfaced, and that’s when the dread started. I tried to suppress my feelings instead of facing them, and they continued to grow until my worries felt like monstrous things that were bound to doom me. Now in the daylight, I can see that these monsters were only truly shadows. Once I realized the root of my anxieties and saw them for what they were, I could think more rationally about them.
My life in college has been a very fluid experience. Each year has brought a new challenge or adventure. My friend graduating is just another change that’ll be part of the college journey, and soon I’ll graduate too. There will come a point where I’ll have to let this go and move forward with my life, and I have to be okay with it.
I’ve always thought of graduation as losing something and leaving people behind, but now I realize that I’ve created so many memories that can never be lost.
Instead of dreading the time by myself, I realized that solitude doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It’s a time when I can do something for myself, like read a new book or listen to my favorite playlist. Instead of being inescapable, it can be my own little escape.
The dread is still there, but it’s much smaller and quieter now. I was so determined to get rid of the feelings that were building up instead of accepting and understanding them. There are still times when I struggle, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to overcome my negative rumination and anxiety completely, but I can finally sit and savor the solitude every now and then.