I used to hear horror stories about my local community college.
“It’s so impersonal!”
“Nobody talks to you!”
“Super impossible to make friends.”
At first, I thought this sort of rhetoric was lazy; nothing, especially socializing in your early adulthood, is impossible. While school is technically a place designed for education first and foremost, its secondary and perhaps most useful function is its ability to catalyze social connections. When I went to college, my God, I thought, I would be more of a social butterfly than I had ever been. This was, of course, until I got to college.
Hunter is a social community for lots of people. Every ethnicity and cultural background has its own club, which is awesome, unless you’re me and you’re completely lacking in a culture that doesn’t find its roots in ham salad sandwiches (don’t knock it until you try it). There are also lots of other specialized clubs, for film and socialism and democratic socialism, but their Thursday night meetings seemed designed for kids that didn’t have jobs and weren’t completely self-sufficient—something I was proud of being. I lived 30 minutes from school, off-campus, and I found myself spending as little time as possible on the Hunter “campus” because there was my apartment and my job and “my” neighborhood, which gave me a greater sense of community than Hunter’s Hillel Club. I was becoming an isolationist on my own volition and blaming my social anxieties on my inability to insert myself into social situations.
I wasn’t trying to be social because Hunter wasn’t trying to make me social.
My first semester I felt completely disenfranchised. By my second, I was writing for an online community (which isn’t so much of a social activity, but a non-work activity nonetheless), and I was even doing the occasional theater event which left me with a vague sense of belonging, though nothing that was thrilling. I was, at the very least, no longer convinced I had to transfer to a probably-lower quality, probably-higher cost, private university to feel fulfilled. Fall of my sophomore year came and went just the same, but it wasn’t until this semester that I joined a student-directed production and spent 12+ hours a week with a tight-knit group of Hunter students from all fields of study and reasons-for-being (both in a scholarly and metaphysical sense), that I found out making friends wasn’t impossible. Not only that, but finding friends was a Hunter student growing pain that was not belonging only to myself.
I sat in the hallway with two of my castmates, one of which who dormed at the Hunter College dormitories (yes, they exist). We sat and chatted, scrunched up on the ledge that runs along the skywalk, and like clockwork kids would walk by, and she [the dormer] would wave hello and spark conversation and introduce me to both this new person and this new idea that perhaps not everyone at Hunter College lives within their mono-social sphere. My other castmate [living in Queens with her grandparents, seemingly just as uncertain about the likelihood of making friends at Hunter] would look at me with wide eyes. Our exchanged glances based on a common understanding of a new way of understanding: was it just us that couldn’t do this whole social thing?
Two weeks later, I ended up at the Hunter College dorms, at the first non-school-sanctioned social event I had attended with Hunter students. I saw kids I knew, there was talking, and dancing, and music playing, and while I was silently writhing within my own social anxieties, I was also elated to find out that making friends was actually possible. I wasn’t unbearable; in fact, other kids wanted to ENGAGE in CONVERSATION... with ME. It was a coming of age that left the two kids in 'A Separate Peace' shaking in their boots (and one of them died, so you know how much I felt for this experience).
The secret, I guess I found out, is to put yourself out there, which seems like a silly and grandiose statement. But it turns out that if you don’t act all weird, because sometimes you feel different but instead just be different, most people that don’t mind and in turn, matter, won’t even blink. If you just admit that you’ve listened to nothing but the Bee Gees for the past week, instead of dancing around a conversation about that new Drake album, it might make for fun conversation. You can run from yourself, but you’ll also be running from prime social opportunities, and you’ll eventually find out that nobody wanted you to run or hide in the first place.
