College is the place of epiphanies; One day, you wake up and you are eighteen years old, a crazy distance away from home with nothing familiar, and completely lost (at least sometimes anyways). However, after living eighteen years on this Earth you come to find that you knew absolutely nothing until you decided to come to college. You find yourself way more well-versed and worldly after one semester versus the past lifetime you spent in your hometown. The best part being, everyone learns something different.

I came to college and tried to find my home to the best of my ability by being active in several different organizations and joining Greek life, but I ended up finding much more. The more I got involved in leadership the more I was influenced to reflect on myself and the qualities that were both good and bad. The one thing I learned that is both the worst and best quality I have is that I am a selfless and giving person. Majority would think being selfless is great because you aren’t selfish and egotistical and all the great Disney Princesses had these qualities, right? Well, you are dreadfully wrong. People who are selfless love differently than everyone else. The process as a whole is a completely different world. I find myself constantly reflecting on why I make some of the decisions I do and come to find that it is just who I am.

So here's to all of you selfless lovers out there because being selfless means sometimes you forget about yourself and that often your feelings take a back-burner to everything else. These are those people that do all the cute "goals" post you see on Twitter without you asking them to. The people who: get you food when they know you did not have much time to eat, leave you little love notes just to remind you that they do truly care, or sit down and help you study for a test even though they don't take that class just to name a few. I remember countless boyfriends that I had that I was always giving more and more and never receiving anything. Yet, I never complained. I didn't complain about days of no communication or months of 110% effort when I'm barely receiving half of that back. I found myself grieving not only a loss after they left but an adapted lifestyle I had become accustomed to because it was most beneficial to them despite any trouble it may have caused me. True love is selfless, but true love is not one-sided selfless. You can give all that you have until you have nothing left to give and people will still ask for more unless they believe your happiness is of equivalent importance or even greater than that.

My mom always told me I was “different”, but I never understood why until now. She’d say, “People like you love differently”. My first thought was this, Why me? For several months I continued to ask myself that very question until I figured out that it was not all that bad. I look back on all the little things I put all of my best efforts forward and how many people that surrounded me that loved me all the better for the fact that I was always giving them so much that they never had to ask for and in the end, they did the same. Despite the heart-wrenching pain you sometimes get when you give someone your all and still fail, the reward of getting it back is so much sweeter.