I've never been a person for having a solid friend group. For me it's always been a bunch of clusters of friends, a few here and a few there. Most of the time I don't mind because I love how each segment reflects a different part of who I am. Sometimes though I do wish there was just one group of people I could do everything with.

SEE ALSO: What It's Like Not To Have Friends In College

There seems to be a natural progression from elementary school where everyone plays on the playground together to middle school where individual interests start to emerge and groups of those with similar interests begin to form. There's a slight upset in high school when the introduction of interactions with people in other grades changes friend groups slightly, but the foundation of the middle school groups enables new groups to form.

But what happens if you skip that step in middle school? I skipped that step. I moved twice in middle school, first to a new school in a different state, and then a year later back to my first middle school. In the year I was gone, groups formed but the people I'd been friends with were all in different groups. I didn't really know what to do with this and remained on the border of a couple groups, trying to maintain the friendships, but not being a part of the different groups.

In high school, I busied myself with a zillion activities, all of which I loved but it left me with very little time to spend with people who weren't in those activities. I bounced between two groups, never fully immersed in either. To some extent my friendships lacked one aspect of depth because of a lack of commonality of experiences. The closest thing was my five-person calculus class senior year, but only one year together before going our separate ways for college means our group exists in addition to our other friendships, not as the center of our social interaction.

Freshman year of college I was determined to find a group. I did, but by the time the second semester rolled around, three out of four of the girls I had spent the most time with had decided to transfer out. I formed friendships with other people but not a specific group. This year I have wonderful friends, but like all the previous times, they're segmented.

I'm learning that my style of making friends is to choose people I see value in. That I pick people I genuinely enjoy, and that those people have a wide range of things that make them awesome. One thing they all have in common is a good heart, it just gets expressed differently in each person. I will most likely never have that "squad" or "fam" but I will have good people who each bring their own unique flair to my life.