At times like the return to school and debut of a new year, whether it is at the high school level or a semester a college, it is important to keep your self-identity, presence, and knowledge centered especially when you are new to an environment. In order to ensure your self-care in an environment with new people look out for these indicators!

Building up relationships with your peers, most commonly in the beginning of the academic year or while attending classes on a campus whether it's the first or fourth time, is important for both support and enjoyment.

But, building up expectations for what these people can be for you or who they actually are is a bit of a toxic path that can lead to disappointing, stressful, and hurtful results. These results are including not only you but the person on the other side of this exchange of expectations.

While anxious thoughts of your supposed incapability to be cool, confident, and trendy creep around your head, it becomes astonishingly easy to think that no one else around you is feeling the same way.

Once these thoughts have already taken hold, it becomes apparent that those around you are somehow immune to these same sentiments and are therefore built up as more of a person but this is never the truth, a person is never more than a person. We all share these nerves and uncertainties even when they are expressed in a large variety of ways.

Your expectations of a person and their "flawless" identity extend to the expectations of what you think they can make happen for you. Once you befriend them, you may think that they can be a solution to some of your issues and be a constant support. While this is ideal, it is not always the way.

Developing a relationship with someone this way can lead to hurt on both sides; the constant putting down of your own self will continue when you are stuck comparing traits and the other party is also set up to a height that they cannot maintain.

Placing someone on a pedestal shows a weakness in yourself but also hurts that person, leaving them with the idea that any blunder or fault will cause them to only go down in their approval.

We as people make human errors but can learn from them, we aren’t always able to maintain a steady emotional state and the dynamics of that are completely natural. Giving a friend the inability to freely have faults and accept them in this way is not a true depiction of friendship. And, doubting your ability to present yourself as strongly as someone else seems is not a true depiction of your spirit and self-identity.

Set your mind free of these thoughts and remember that we are all human, working our way through the semester and life as best as we can. Support systems and friendships are for growth, not for contests and comparisons. Happy relationship building to all!