A year ago I was you.

Freshman year is hard- really, really hard. And while it may seem like everybody else has their life altogether, they don’t.

I came to Washington State University knowing it was praised upon its’ sense of community, being one of the happiest campuses on earth and a place where you meet your best friends for life. But I found myself my first semester of freshman year, wondering how everybody else seemed to have this, but for whatever reason, I did not. I was especially confused on what I was doing wrong because I know of so many people who truly have found their place at this school, and it is one of the sole reasons why I picked WSU.

I met some people I really enjoyed, and there were others who seemed like great people but I just had not had the opportunity to get to know them yet. But overall, I had not found my best friends.

I felt like everybody around me had found their place, had the friends that would be in their wedding one day and belonged so well on our campus.

It was not been until my first semester Sophomore year that I have been able to recognize how far off in all of my assumptions I really was.

It is so funny looking back and talking to the people who I thought had it all together when in reality they were feeling just as vulnerable as I was.

Some of the people who I thought had the best friendships and were having the time of their lives were actually feeling the same way.

Here is the reality of freshman year.

Six weeks before your first day, you graduated high school. You graduated from not only a school, but also from being told what to do by “higher powers” every day for the last 18 years. You graduated from living in the same place most if not all of your life, and you graduated from the life that had been consistent and yours for so long. Fast forward six weeks, and you are the same person, but life is suddenly very different. You are only around 42 days wiser, yet you are thrown into this crazy whirlwind called college. You are no longer a high school student, you are a college student. You are supposed to feed yourself, not be reminded to do your homework, remember to do your laundry, and jump through hoops to make yourself known to a professor who teaches three different lectures each with 500 students.

You are no longer seeing your best friend every day in second and fourth period along with lunch.

You live alone in a school of at least 25,000 people and you are all of a sudden expected to have the time of your life and meet the people who will be your best friends for life.

The media gives us a perception on the way our lives are supposed to go. We as people just being human create these false perceptions of ourselves on how our lives are supposed to play out and what we are supposed to be experiencing depending on where we are in our lives.

We are not told going into school how hard freshman year is. All we hear is the positive side because people will only ever portray themselves to others at their absolute best.

This is not normal. In fact, nothing about this is normal.

And just recently, my friends and I discussed how none of these things are normal, and we laughed about how last year we did not feel like we belonged at all, despite believing everybody else did. The people who I thought felt invincible felt the same way as I did and the same way as you do.

It is funny because here I am a year later, confidently able to say I have my best friends who will one day be in my wedding. I have met the people who will always have my back, always make me laugh and have taught me what it means to be a part of the community at WSU, and I am meeting new people all of the time. I am now one of the people who compares our university to Disneyland. I get it now. But just know that I did not always get it, and at one point, none of us understood it.

Whether you feel you are having a hard time fitting into your sorority, fraternity, dorm or classes, I promise this will be temporary if you choose for it to be. Make the conscious decision to reach out to people, to say yes to going on an adventure and stepping out of your comfort zone. But most importantly, remind yourself that you are not alone, because you are so not. Remind yourself that how you are feeling is OK, and that this too shall pass.

One day, I was you. And a year from now, you will look back, and you will feel like me.