Being lonely in college: Removing the stigma

There’s always so many expectations surrounding your college experience, from it leading to your dream career, to finding yourself, to experiencing the best years of your life.

My older brother went to college and had a ball. He lived with two guys in student accommodation in first year, instantaneously became friends with them and they continued to live together for the next four years of college. My older sister went to college, didn’t have such a wonderful experience in first year, but in the coming years she found her friends that she would eventually move halfway around the world with. Then there’s me, I have amazing friends, the best I could ever ask for. The issue is, I met them when I was twelve in secondary school, and now we all go to different colleges, spread across the country, seeing each other altogether approximately four times a year. But in college, I can’t say that I’ve made no friends, but nobody that has really stuck the same way as the others. Nobody that I see often or no one to just randomly text to meet up for a cuppa or randomly decide to go out drinking. So, I guess I haven’t so much made ‘friends’ as I am ‘friendly’ with a few people.

Now I am pretty close to finishing up my college experience, and I haven’t had the best years of my life, I haven’t made any new forever friends and I have no clue who I will be surrounded by in the years to come. However, I sit here, and I realise, I’m only twenty-one, I have so much time ahead of me, maybe I’ve already met my forever friends, I think I have. And I hope - and the chances are I’m right - that the best years of my life are yet to come. I’ll travel the world, solo or with others or a combination of both, I’ll have shitty jobs with fun people who make the job worth it. I have the rest of my life to continue meeting people. And yes, I definitely do get lonely, but at the end of the day, it’s only temporary, a temporary feeling that everyone goes through in life at some stage. I will see my friends again, and I will graduate college and meet new people. Learning how to be alone and feel okay about it is another experience most people go through. Being alone really gives you the opportunity to look inwards at yourself and I can fully say now that I 100% like who I am as a person, and that’s more important than other people liking you.