Walking into my dorm for the first time was very lonely, but mostly because I moved in a day before official move-in day. I remember the first evening sitting in my room alone after my parents left and just wallowing in my loneliness. I hadn't met my roommate yet and there was so much right ahead of me but in that moment there was silence and empty walls and one empty bed, desk, and closet staring right back at me.
I felt lonely even after everyone showed up and unpacked their luggage and their parents said goodbyes. It was like that for a few months, no need to lie about that. I felt lonely coming back to my empty room on Saturday nights when my roommate was home for the weekend (I love you now that you stick around though ;)). I felt lonely not being able to see my boyfriend of over a year, secluded from my family and friends, and any comfortability of home. I wasn't homesick, I just felt like I didn't fit here in my shiny new college life.
There were many times I just couldn't figure out why this wasn't working for me like it did for everyone else. At this point, almost all of first semester was gone and I had all but given up on the idea that I would ever get close to my floor or make any great friends.
It's crazy when you realize the moment something begins to transform, you just feel a shift in the air around you or you feel a soft jolt in your spine that lets you know something big is about to happen. This is what happened to me the stretch of school between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break; I'd been over the entire thing for quite some time now. I was tired of trying so desperately to fit into a friend group I just felt I was forcibly trying to be removed from at all times. And that's when something switched.
It's when I no longer looked at the friend group with jealousy and such a strong desire to fit in that I finally did. I'm a long-time sufferer of chronic overthinking and this is what killed first semester for me. I kept thinking and thinking and thinking about what these people did or what they would do instead of just focusing on who I was. These people became my family.
Connections have never been easy for me, they don't come quickly as it seems they do with everyone else. I've never been so happy for a belated connection in my life, the people on my floor are some of my very best friends, people I never would've imagined I'd meet in my entire life on this Earth. These people are the ones I wait for to come home after a long day, the people I do laundry with, eat every meal with, laugh with, cry with, and tell when they need to shower.
Creating a family in college is hard, especially when you come in blind like all four of us did. We all chose to have random roommates and ended up right down the hall from one another. This family is the result of fallouts and problems and getting to know every part of each others' lives that we weren't there for. And I think that's my favorite part of it all. We're all from so many different places and so many different ways of life, but we're all family.
And, yeah, I sometimes forget their siblings' names or how many dogs they have but college families are on such a different level than high school best friends. We live right down the hall, half of us in the same room as the other, we have sleepovers and late night talks and everything in between. I have stories with them that wouldn't make sense to anyone else.
It makes me sad thinking about summer and all parting our separate ways, but we'll always be family thanks to Spruce 3B.
