Keeping in touch with your friends from home is difficult, but it gets easier once you've settled in.
Losing contact with some home friends is very unfortunate, but natural. Even though social media makes it easier to keep in touch with friends who live far away, it is very easy to get caught up in the affairs of our own lives. I often forget to reach out to someone with a simple text or respond to a FaceTime because I am easily distracted by the goings-on of my own life. Unfortunately, I do not have any sound advice for this when it happens, in part because I am still figuring it out for myself -- I can only share from my subjective experiences, and I suck at keeping in touch.
I have found that it is common to feel detached and uninvolved from the lives of our home friends. This sounds so depressing, but I promise it really isn't. As we are all experiencing our own and very different realities, it is difficult to grasp the reality of another's. Meaning, I am accustomed to knowing everyone in their lives and now I am on the outside of their individual bubbles that they have built at college, as they are to mine. First semester I spoke to my friends very infrequently, and now I rarely go more than a few days without speaking to the home friends who I have remained very close with, simply because of our combined efforts.
Living with another person is strange, but it is nowhere near as bad as the movies make it seem.
To shy away from the heavy stuff, I truly thought that living with another person would be a nightmare. After watching my queen, Blair Waldorf, in The Roommate, I had legitimate fears that my future roommate would wear my clothing, get a tattoo of my name, dye her hair blonde (fine, ginger), and eventually try and kill me. In all honesty, I think I would find that very flattering...of course with the exception of the attempted murder. But in reality, I have found quite the opposite. Living with another person is great. As long as you stay away from the same boys, which we have (with one exception), our "fights" are mostly trivial -- about my messy side, when I broke my rib, who fills our Brita, or that I left chocolate covered strawberries in our fridge over break. Omg, I'm realizing I'm the problem. In all seriousness, my roommate basically lends me her closet so when I go out I am essentially her but way paler. And I really want to dye my hair brunette... so I guess she could argue that I am becoming her. Just kidding?
Here are some important hacks to maintain a good relationship with your freshman roommate:
1. Be mindful of your roommate's space
2. Find time for yourself and engage in separate activities
3. You don't have to be the very best of friends, but try and spend some time together to get to know each other
4. Listen to each other
5. Let him or her know when something is bothering you. Do not let your anger fester because it will transform into passive aggressiveness.
People tend to make college lives between schools into a competition.
Who is the happiest at college among your high school friends or peers is not a competition. Your happiness or unhappiness is nobody's business but your own. A lot of this has to do with social media and I think that people should stop shaming others based on their social media presence or lack thereof. On countless occasions I have heard, "She never posts snap stories, so she must be having a horrible time!" This is utterly ridiculous and completely false. While I admit that I have taken part in conversations like this one, looking back I am ashamed. You cannot judge anything from someone's social media because as I've mentioned in previous articles, people only share what they want others to see.
