At first, going to college far away from your high school friends can be daunting.
For me, I had the same friends all throughout my middle and high school years, so I never knew what it was like to be apart from them. When we all decided where to go to for college, it was sad to see that everyone was going our separate ways. We all promised to keep in contact and FaceTime and do everything we could to keep up with each other's lives, but after a while, all the talking turned into silence. Although it may not seem like it, growing apart from your high school friends in college is actually a positive thing.
When I first got to Michigan State, I didn't know anyone within 12 hours. It was so easy for me to just settle for talking to my friends back home all the time to see what they were up to while they were going through the same things. Let me tell you, eating at the cafeteria alone and FaceTiming someone from back home gets old very quickly.
Once I started getting involved in clubs and going to events on campus, I figured out that there are so many great people that are similar to me. As the first semester went on and I started to make solid friendships, I let my friendships with people back home slide down a little bit on my list of priorities, and that's totally fine.
Just because you guys don't talk every second of every day, or know exactly what is going on in each other's lives, doesn't mean that you don't care or cherish the memories that you made together. It's understandable that at the beginning of college when moving to a new place with all new people, you're going to miss your friends back home, but don't let that stop you from putting yourself out there and trying to make new friends.
You may think it's going to be easy to make friends, but it's not; especially if you spent all of your childhood and adolescence with the same people. If you don't grow apart from your old friendships back home, how are you going to grow into new ones?
When you don't let old friendships go, there isn't much room for new ones. You spend your time living in the past instead of the present, and that's a really isolating feeling. I'm not saying that you should completely cut ties with everyone back home, but loosening the tie a bit may be what you need to make new memories with new people. That way you can always go back home and have great stories to tell your old friends, who should work to move on in their lives too.
Some high school friendships last forever, but some were meant to be just that: high school friendships. Don't let the connection to your hometown friends get in the way of you getting to know the people that you will be spending four years of your life with, because the friendships you make in college are ones that will last a lifetime.
