It’s no secret that coming to college is a big change. You’re moving away from home for the first time, stepping away from your daily routines, and distancing yourself from the people you grew up with. It can be scary—change—but it can also be a good thing.
Leaving behind everything that you have come to know is terrifying. You don’t know what’s ahead of you or where life will take you, but you do know that you’re going to be hours and miles away from home and from your family and friends. My freshman year of college I grew apart from the people I had considered my best friends and had spent practically every day with back in high school. There was no fight, no big falling out of any kind, we just got busy. We all had so many things going on that life just kind of got in the way and went our separate ways.
It was really hard for me to accept at first. I would see pictures of them all having fun with their new friends. WhileI had plenty of those myself, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for all the times we hung out in someone’s basement until 2 a.m., driving around town because there was nothing else to do on a Saturday night, goofing off in the school cafeteria during lunch, and all the memories in between. It took me awhile to realize that sometimes the friends you have in high school are really only your friends because you see them in the halls every day. I’ve finally come to terms with it and realized that not only is it OK, but it’s normal.
You go through so many changes in college, and you finally start figuring out who you are as a person and where you want to go with your life. While it’s still sad that our friend group grew apart, I know that it helped me become the person I am today and even if we never reconnect, every single one of them was apart of my life for a reason.
A lot of things happen when you go away to college for the first time and while you may not understand at the moment why things happen the way they do, one day you’ll realize that it was just leading up to something great. So it’s okay to grow apart from those friends you had in high school. It’s okay to not be as close to your best friend as you once were. It may seem like the end of the world at the moment, but I promise you that you’ll get through it. Don’t dwell on the past, keep pushing forward. One day you’ll look back and realize that everything turned out just fine.
