It’s every new kid’s nightmare. It’s the somewhat cliché but still true scene that seems to occur in every young adult novel or teen movie: having no one to sit with at lunch (or in the case of college, any meal).
Coming into my freshman year of college, I didn’t know anybody. Thus, there were many times that I ate my meals alone. The Sunday before school started, I was eating my lunch alone in the Commons (one of the main eating places on campus) when a friendly girl introduced herself to me and asked if she could join me for a few minutes; I of course said yes. When I told her that I wasn’t waiting for anybody, she was surprised and said that I was brave to eat all alone. This was a new way of thinking for me. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to eat in my room for fear that my roommate would think I have no friends (which was true but also ridiculous because school hadn’t even started yet). I didn’t have anyone to invite to eat with me yet, and even if I had I would be too shy to ask. What if they said no and then pitied me for not having anyone to eat with?
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Eating alone in public was one of my biggest struggles freshman year, and is one I am still working on overcoming, though I’ve gone a far way. The problem stems from my fear of judgment from my fellow diners. My thought process was that if people saw me eating alone, they would think I have no friends, and thus would either pity me or see me as an outcast. "Look at that girl sitting all alone. She must have no one here who cares about her. How sad." Or perhaps: "Look at that girl sitting all alone. She must have no friends. What a loser." Even as those thoughts floated around my brain, I ate alone. Once I did have people I could ask to eat with, I didn’t want to come off as too clingy or be an annoyance. So I would keep my dorm room door open in hopes that people passing by would see me and invite me to dinner, or I would desperately hope that someone who saw me eating alone would invite me to eat with them.
These weren’t really solutions to my problem, however. I realized that I would have to change my way of thinking. The only way to feel comfortable eating alone was to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with it in the first place. Whenever I ate alone and started to feel insecure, I would remind myself of this fact.
The part of my brain that wanted to protest my improvement would say, “But the only people who eat alone are people who are studying! If you eat alone and don’t have a laptop in front of you everyone will know you are friendless!” Well, insecure part of my brain, I have two counters to your argument. First, why are you so hung up on having friends? Yes, friends are important and everyone should have some system of support, but no one is thinking about friends all of the time. No one automatically thinks that someone has no friends if they see that person by themself. Only you do, because it is an issue you are insecure about. Second, people do not hang out with their friends all the time. Just because I am alone does not mean I have no friends. I just do not have any friends with me currently.
This last insecurity is something I am still working on. I am now comfortable eating alone, whether I am doing homework or not. However, I occasionally have moments where I am sitting by myself and feel the need to mentally convey to people that I do indeed have friends. When people pass by, I’ll think, “I have friends, I swear! I’m just alone right now, but I’m not alone in general!” The irrational worry of people pitying me still lingers even though I’m now a junior, but it is starting to fade.
Let me make explicit the point of this article, because I think it is important for everyone, but especially college freshmen to know: there is nothing wrong with eating alone. No one is actually judging you even if it seems like they are, and if they are judging just remember, “people who mind don’t matter and people who matter don’t mind.”
