Freshman year is weird. Entering college, everyone has an image of what they want it to be. You’re leaving home and moving into a completely foreign environment, where you know one or two people if you’re lucky. What everyone wants from a college experience, is a home. But “home” doesn’t mean making your dorm as cozy as your childhood bedroom, or making the dining hall your kitchen. It means surrounding yourself with people that feel like family. We strive and search for people who will accept us just as we are – people who will be there for us at our lows and at our highs.
The issue is, that’s a really high expectation. Expecting to walk in and immediately find your people is unrealistic. Instead, freshman year, as we know, is filled with feelings of confusion, disorientation, and even loneliness at times. And on top of all of that, we’re supposed to go to class, exercise, eat healthy, join a million clubs, get eight hours of sleep, and make and maintain lifelong friends.
Easy, huh?
For us, this was definitely a slow process. We found and built ourselves micro-communities of 2s and 4s … waiting for our circle to grow bigger. But maybe, what we didn’t even realize, is that the right people, the people would love us and care for us, were closer than we thought, and all we had to do was find them.
And friends are so much more than merely doing things together, friends are people who will drop whatever they are doing on a Friday night, run home, and just hug you when you need it. Whether we’re talking or not talking, all we care about is that we’re together.
Becoming friends out of simply needing somewhere to live seems arbitrary – and maybe it is … but for us, it turned into something pretty damn beautiful.