It has only been about three months since I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin, and while I am thoroughly enjoying every minute here, but I can not help but miss my friends from home. People are not kidding when they say everyone here is from Texas. It seems that a lot of the new students here are sticking with their friends from high school, and I don’t blame them. Comfort is something that we naturally seek, so I would do the same thing with my friends Carl and Isabel if I had decided to go to UC Santa Barbara instead.
Nonetheless, I still have met a fantastic bunch of people from Texas. They all are welcoming and kind, but I still feel as if I am walking around with a veil around me. When I was with my friends at home, I could do the most absurd, embarrassing, and stupid things only for them to laugh along with me.
There was week over the winter break of my Senior year when 15 of my closest friends and I vacationed in Lake Tahoe. We rented one house for all of us and spent those days playing in the snow, making food for each other, going to Snow Globe, and most notably, watching Bob Ross paint. It was one of the best weeks of my life; I knew all of those people so well that we rarely spent more than a few awaken minutes without laughing.
Here, I have yet to meet new friends without upholding a perfect image of myself. I have yet to stop telling silly white lies as anecdotes to stories people tell me when I get in conversations with them. I have yet to discover or create the stories and memories that easily draw up a laugh amongst my friends here. I have yet to feel no pressure to keep a conversation going when it ends.
I realize that what I had with my friends from home is something that took all of high school and middle school to form. But having this sense of family so engraved in my life for such a while makes me yearn for that feeling again.
Pessimism is not the appropriate approach to where I am now, because I know it will only make my process more difficult. My experience here is going to be defined by my approach to it, and I am determined to make college the best few years of my life. I continue to be extroverted by throwing myself at opportunities in organizations and elsewhere to make new friends.
Hopefully in doing so, I will find people to dance along with me to “Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride” at a Hawaiian-themed party, to go to the beach spontaneously with me for a day, to explore the city with me late on a Saturday night, to cook dinners with me, to dance to live music with me on a Friday night, and to blissfully spend every minute with.
The silence here amongst my friends here is still awkward, and I am waiting for when it can be comfortable again.