My roommate moved out of my dorm at the end of the first quarter of college last year. She was my best friend from high school and prior to coming to college, we planned out every crazy adventure we would have from our first college parties, the amazing Oregon hikes we would go on and how cute our dorm room would look. Now that she’s gone I spend my time with my headphones in, blasting Hippie Sabotage to fill the not so silence, between my fellow colleagues screaming “Snapchat me your pussy” outside in the quad and my upstairs neighbors having loud intercourse.
Don’t get me wrong, I made friends without my best friend when I started at this small college town a few months ago. Yeah, I hang out with them every so often to let my inner extrovert out, but here’s the thing about college, and I guess about life in general: you meet so many temporary people. You become friends with that one girl who sits next to you in math class purely because you don’t get what you’re doing in class for the majority of the time and you don’t want to keep raise your hand. You become friends with your group mates because you see them every class period so I mean you might as well. But the probability that you’ll hang out of them outside of class is small.
Sure, you can sort through everyone in the school and find more friends. But honestly, I don’t want to waste my time with superficial conversations about what I’m majoring in and how I like college so far when in reality you and I would probably never mix and never meet again. And it's so unrealistic but I just want there to be this check mark above everyone's head that only I can see, if this person and I could potentially be friends and with those that I absolutely wouldn’t and couldn’t befriend, they get an “x.” But it’s funny because I’m being completely hypocritical right now. I’m a communications major for Christ's sake. I want to communicate for a living, yet I can’t find it within myself to be socially active.
This is my college struggle right now: coping with the feeling of being alone and not having it within me to make friends. And I’m okay with it. I love my alone time so much, I don’t care how much of a loner that makes me sound like. I love reflecting on the day's events, journaling, reading a book with a cup of earl grey tea and writing these articles. I love drowning out the world and focusing on me.
And this past week of being truly alone I have gotten so many things done and realized so much about me. I started watercoloring and it turns out I’m pretty great at it. I applied to a few internships for the summer and realized how amazing I am in the field that I want to dive into because these people actually want me to work for them! I’m so excited with how my life is going I forget that I live alone and that I had a problem with it.
Being alone has always had this bad connotation connected to it, like it's the plague, something that should be completely avoided. But in reality it’s easy to end up alone, and it happens to the best of us, but it's hard to be okay with it. Now that's a skill everyone should have.
