Do you know that feeling when you can't order at a restaurant because you think you'll screw it up? No. You know you will. The words you've gone over a hundred times in your head topple out of your mouth, chaotic and disjointed. Um's are sprinkled throughout the sentence even though you know what you're trying to say, and your cheeks are turning red because you can't say the word "hamburger."

I used to be like that. I still am. I avoid people a lot (sorry to the people I know who like me enough to hang out with me). And when I go out, I still try my hardest to get other people to order for me at restaurants, or at the very least, order for themselves because I know I'll mess it up. But one thing that my first year of college in a new city has taught me is that it's okay for me to go and do things by myself. The anxiety of being in a new place may not ever go away, but the feeling that I'm going to do something wrong by acting crazy or passionate doesn't exist when the people around me don't know me.

I recognized these things in September, only a month and a half into my freshman year of college. I realized that there would come a time that I wanted to do something and the people around me, even though they enjoyed similar things, wouldn't always want to go with me to do the things that I wanted to. This happened for the first time at Music Midtown, a music festival that's held in Atlanta each fall. I wanted to see Bastille, one of my all time favorite bands, and all of my friends had other bands they wanted to see who played during the same time slot.

So I kept my head down and walked through the maze of thousands of people, checking to make sure my phone wasn't dead multiple times, until I got to the stage. And there I waited with hundreds of people crowded around me, strangers who happened to be just as passionate about Bastille as I was and were willing to be pushed together for the sake of music. That concert was the best I have ever been to, and I've been to quite a few. I was free, surrounded by people I didn't know and who I would never see again. I was free to dance and sing and shout—things I most likely wouldn't have done with my friends around me, because even though they are my friends, at the time I wasn't comfortable enough around them.

Later when I told my roommate about the concert and how amazing it was, she seemed disappointed that I wouldn't have had the same experience if she was there with me. That concert brought me to tears, and I know for a fact that wouldn't have happened if she was there. And I think now I know why. All of those strangers, packing in around me and pushing to be closer to the music, wouldn't have been strangers if she was there. That energy of thousands pulsing through the ground as we jumped to the beat wouldn't have surged through me the same way because I would have been too busy thinking about that person beside me who would see what I was doing, who would see me making a fool of myself.

No matter how much love she has for me, that same little voice of anxiety that made me question everything when I screwed up an order at a restaurant would have been there. But nameless in the crowd, dancing under the stars, I was free.