I read something on Twitter the other day that got me thinking. It said, “College is like losing your mom in the grocery store for four years." We were thrown into some foreign place with no idea who anyone or anything was and we were supposed to adapt and make it “home” all by ourselves. The thing was, we weren’t five year-olds anymore. Crying in public and screaming for our mothers until the nice, plump lady (with way too much red lipstick on) came over to provide us with some comfort as “Martha Morrissey, your daughter is waiting for you at the customer service office” blasted over the loudspeakers would be the last thing any of us would dare to do. No, it was time to be big kids, and it was time to find our way through the multitude of aisles alone. And we weren’t alone because in our “grocery store” of college, there were hundreds of other lost eighteen year-olds who were crying and frantically searching for a way out as well.

You’ll make a lot of different friendships in your life. You have your “womb” mates, the ones inside the pregnant ladies standing next to your pregnant mom in all the family photos. You have your preschool friends who you’ll randomly find again under “suggested friends” on Facebook ten years down the road. Then there are your middle school and high school friends, who endured and suffered the awkward years with you. God bless them. But the most important friends of all are the ones you made in college. The ones you would die for. The ones who have helped to keep you alive in a time when you were surviving off of eight dollars an hour for ten to fifteen hours a week. The ones you would do anything to take care of and protect and the ones that you know would do the same for you.

The thing with your friends in college is that they are a whole lot different from any other type of friends you have. College is a time of transition where we are expected to learn and know everything about the world within a short span of four, maybe even three, years. It’s basically a time where we learn how to survive. The thing about survival is that we can’t do it alone. Even the heroic Oliver Queen in Arrow had someone with him on that island as he was trapped for five years. That someone to us is our college friends, the ones we go to crying at 2 a.m. because our professor emailed us feedback from our ten page papers saying it was all wrong the day before it was due. The ones we rant to because that stupid boy "forgot" to text us back. They're the ones who call an Uber for us when we're stuck in the middle of the city and our app is malfunctioning. They are the ones who make the same mistakes as us, eating 3000 calories worth of pizza in one sitting or accidentally spending four hundred dollars a month and being expected to survive off of the eighty-nine cents in our bank accounts until our next paycheck came in. Our college friends are the ones who, when we're upset for no known reason, let us crawl into their beds and just cry in the middle of the day telling us “we’re gonna make it through this” because our own parents bed is thousands of miles away. The self-centeredness that used to exist within the walls of friendship no longer exist in this type of relationship, we take care of each other as we would our own family, and together we are able to survive as we figure our how to do life and college together.

So, yeah, I lost my mom in the grocery store when I got to college. The thing is, I’m finding my own way. That nice, plump lady found me, except this time she was in the form of my best friends; my new built-in family. My college friends are the ones I will love beyond the four years, they’re the ones who have helped me to navigate and survive through the aisles of life, because even though none of us know what we’re doing, at least we’re doing it together.