One thing that coming to college has taught me is the importance of a strong support system in quite literally every single aspect of your life. While I know this sounds super obvious, like doesn't everybody know this and have some sort of support system in their life, like family and friends? But the thing is that often times when you get into college you meet friends who seem to support you but in actuality are not there for you when you actually need them. Now that is not someone I would consider a friend.

Some of the struggles that I have faced in the past few months and how learning who truly is there for me in life has truly changed the course of my mental, emotional, and physical health. Even if you think that this may not apply to you, I promise you it applies to someone you know whether or not you are aware of it. Please check up on your friends and family, even the strongest ones, we are all fighting difficult internal battles and could always use the love and support.

I had a few of these types of friends at the beginning of my freshman year in college but I was soon able to see the traits in these so-called "friends" of mine and was able to establish a distance between us. But in this sad realization of some people who I thought were serious friends turning out to be fake, I also came to the realization of which friends of mine were the real deal.

While getting over the ending of friendship is never easy and takes its own time to mend, I also truly learned the importance of being transparent with your family and actually letting them into your life. In high school, it was easy for me to tell my parents what was going on in school and stuff because I was not dealing with some major life problems and in living with them it was harder to keep things a secret. However, once I came to college, life threw many challenges at me and school became increasingly difficult and it was just easier and easier to hide all my problems and just pretend that everything was going perfectly.

After hitting what felt like an emotional rock bottom in the past few months, I confessed to my best friends and my parents about some of the dark struggles that I was going through. Having that conversation with some of the people most important in my life was by far one of the hardest things that I have ever done in my life. Opening up about things that are truly serious and deep is not something that comes easily to me especially to the people that matter the most, but what I wish I knew before is that having that conversation changed the course of my well being for the better. Being fully candid about all my struggles allowed for my parents and me to have some important and serious conversations about my emotional and physical and health and allowed for us to create a plan for me to seek the help I needed all while being supported by my parents and friends.

Since this conversation, I have felt a massive weight lifted off my shoulders, and I have never felt more supported in life. I may still be a big work in progress but I know right now more than ever that I have people who I can trust and people who are there to listen to my struggles and help me to solve my problems. This is what having a strong support system is like. There is no pain unlike realizing that people who you thought were your forever friends truly don't care about you but there is no happiness like realizing that there are people in your life to support you and help you through everything in life.

This is just to say that true friendship and love comes from being there for people and how important it really is for you to be there and check up on your friends, even the ones that seem to have everything together. You can never know what someone is going through, but at the same time, it is important to reach out to those near and dear to you to ask for help and support.