It's common that incoming college freshmen worry that the strength of high school friendships will dwindle when presented with the changes of a college environment. Like many, I worried about this as well. For weeks before I began my college journey, I constantly had nerves about 1) my friends potentially forgetting about me, 2) if I would forget about my friends and 3) how much time I could spend with them before all of these creeping worries became realities. At the end of my freshman year, I found that two main things had happened to my high school friendships, and they were exactly what I should have been expecting.
The most obvious impact that these relationships endured was the worst. They disappeared. It sounds just as heart breaking as it really is. Particular friendships and bonds that I had made with certain people over the previous four years of my life (some even longer) had formed into connections that might as well have not existed. The memories were still there, of course, but the people were not. They were strangers.
This set me into a state of constant paranoia and anxiety about who my hometown friends were, if I even had any left at all. I began to worry incessantly about leaving my new friends at school because I didn’t want to lose them too, and I didn’t want to go back home to nothing. It wasn’t until a month into summer vacation that I realized I had been hyping myself up for nothing at all. Due to the friendships I’d known I had lost, I psyched myself into believing that all of them were lost. Not true, readers, not true at all.
The truth, the reality of these types of situations, is that college, as well as any major life change, will separate the strong from the weak (high school friendships—aka survival of the fittest). The strong relationships and connections will stay strong—whether that strength is obvious, one can never really tell unless they look past the bullshit, anxiety, and worry standing in the way. My advice when it comes to weeding out the good and bad relationships is this: have a conversation. Without getting into an entirely separate rant involving the shield technology has imposed on society nowadays, I will say that texting is not (I repeat, not) a conversation.
I recently experienced a moment of realization and truth when I had a face to face conversation with a best friend who I hadn’t talked to (besides texting) in months. I had begun to convince myself that this friendship was lost, the connection broken. Much to my reassurance, actual human interaction with this person made me feel as though the connection had never been broken. It just needed a little tending to. There are some people you'll be able to stay friends with forever; the thing about friendships and any relationship is that they're a two way street. They only work if both people want them to. For those of you who have been reading my articles for a while, this personal essay may contradict with one of the first articles I've ever written. But only if the effort to keep the connection is neglected.
To the dismay of many, including myself, college has the ability to tear apart and distance high school friendships. However, this doesn’t mean that all old friendships die out. They don't have to.
