Recently I was rewatching what I consider to be my favorite movie of last year, "Brooklyn." In the film, Saoirse Ronan plays a young girl from Ireland who emigrates to Brooklyn, N.Y., so she can build a new life for herself and find work. Once she gets there, she quickly finds herself enjoying school and work and falling in love with a young Italian man named Tony. But soon enough, she gets word that her sister has died and she needs to go back to Ireland to take care of her family. But when she does, she feels different. It’s as if she went from being a fish-out-of-water in the U.S. to being a fish-out-of-water in her homeland.
While I’m far from being a foreign immigrant, I definitely have come to relate to Ronan’s character in the sense that, after finishing my freshman year at DePaul University and coming back to my hometown of Crown Point, Ind., for the summer, I felt like I had become a different person. And while, for many people, that’s great and that's what's supposed to happen when students come home from college, what it’s meant for me during my first summer home from school is a lot of loneliness.
Besides the fact that I wasn’t able to get a job in Crown Point and I spent six straight weeks doing an online biology class through my local community college, oftentimes I would find myself isolated from other people my age doing mindless things in my house and getting too much in my own head about certain things, which after a while can really get to me. Once I watched my 20th Bruce Springsteen concert video on YouTube or took my 17th biology quiz or watered my mom’s flowers for the 10th time in a week, I really began to feel like everyone around me was doing all of these amazing career-and-life-advancing things and I was just wasting time at home.
So, while this summer has definitely not been the ideal one for me, I do feel like it has taught me a couple of things about dealing with loneliness. First, I have learned to take any opportunity, however small or short-term it may be, to have some sort of human contact. Even though you may not be seeing or hanging out with college friends or old high school friends, any opportunity to meet and be around people your own age while getting out of the house is an opportunity worth taking.
At the same time, however, I have learned to not base all of my feelings of self-worth and confidence on other people. I have been able to set personal, independent goals this summer so I can still feel some sort of accomplishment with things that I do, such as developing regular exercise and healthy eating routines at home (something that I was only able to partially accomplish at school) and getting a solid draft of a short film script that I can possibly get off the ground at DePaul. While it may not be as awesome as having a paid internship in Chicago over the summer, it is still something I can comfortably call an accomplishment, no matter how small it may seem in the grand scheme of things.
So, in short, loneliness sucks. Feeling like you’re the only one in your class not doing anything amazing sucks. But, if you are feeling like this, don’t get down on yourself. Even if there’s that one high school friend who wants to get together to have lunch with you, do it. If there’s an opportunity to get away from home for a week or weekend that you’re not sure if you should take, take it. If you have that screenplay that you want to try to revise and make better, put your fingers to the keyboard and work at it.
Take the fleeting summertime as an opportunity for self-betterment, not self-beating or self-hatred. We only get so many summers in our lifetime that we might as well make the best of them.
