People say that God chooses our family but we choose who to make our friends and share precious moments with. That being said it's difficult for some people to talk to someone and build up to the stage of where you can share your ups and downs as well as secrets. For me, talking to anyone was always a task because I am very shy and an introvert by nature. Even then I pushed myself to go out and meet new people. I never had many friends so when in college, I started making friends. I was breaking away from my introvert shy self one-on-one with my classmates. It becomes easy with time.

I made friends and we hung out every now and then but soon they all stopped talking to me after making all the promises like friends usually do. It hurts when people you think are your best friends ignore you down the street as if they don't know you. This incident led me to become carefree; I let myself loose, stopped caring much about what everyone thought about me and would talk freely to anyone. I remember one time I was walking back to my dorm and there were two other guys walking ahead of me talking about graduation and I said: “I know right, who wants to grow up and become an adult.” They turned around and started laughing at what I had said and soon I found myself laughing and talking with them about chemistry and chemical engineering and found out one of the guys was my friend’s brother and the second guy knew my RA. Small events like these helped me break out of my shell and become more outgoing. Even after becoming more outgoing, there were times when I found myself feeling lonely and didn’t have anyone to share my feelings with. I would see my ex-best walk by with her now best friend, and it would make me feel bad. I didn’t understand what I had done to get that kind of treatment. I am a nice, sweet, fun and cool person to be around even though I can be a little nerdy but hey, everyone can be. It just made me feel depressed, but I kept pushing myself and slowly met the right type of people who enjoyed hanging out with me as much I did with them.

I have come to realization that people come and go from our lives for a reason whether it is to be with you for rest of the life or to leave you with a lesson. My lesson from people who came and left was that it’s okay to be alone, a lonely soldier, because at the end of the day if you are happy with yourself and do what you love, and people are going to want to be your friends and even if you don’t talk to them every day, when you do it’ll be like you never stopped talking to them to begin with. Those friends are friends for life.