Last spring, I made the difficult decision to take an extra year of undergrad.
I had a really horrible fourth year of university, full of near constant struggle that changed the way I viewed both the world and myself. While some people crack under pressure, I shattered, splintering off into a hundred million little pieces that I still feel like I am picking up today. They say time heals all wounds, but sometimes time takes longer than you’d expect.
I ultimately chose to defer my acceptance into teachers’ college and finish a second minor, a passion project that I never thought I’d have the chance to complete. Although this was an incredibly hard decision, I’m happy I went through with it. Life is a little bit quieter now, money isn’t nearly as tight and I feel much lighter than I did this time last year. Even though I knew it was going to hurt watching all my friends move on to bigger and brighter things, I hoped that my life wouldn’t change all that much.
What I didn’t expect was how hard that uniformity would be.
I’ve always been told that university is rarely a linear process, but it seems like for everyone I love, it has been pretty darn straightforward: graduation photos posted in June with happy smiles and acceptance letters to great Master’s programs across the country; brand new 9-to-5 government jobs that pay well; joyful first days of teacher’s college classes that I was supposed to be attending, too. These were all things that bothered me at first but weren’t incredibly hard to get over. What hurt the most was the feeling that I’ve lost everyone I care about to better things while I’m stuck in the same place I was four years ago.
The emotional duality of the decision I made was not something that I had been expecting. I’ve always been the kind of person who struggled with the perception of things as being black or white; good or bad; the right decision or the wrong one. But it has been difficult to be intensely categorical about this particular feeling. It is good and bad all at once. While I am thankful for the time to breathe, to make money and to learn how to be myself again, I immensely miss the life I had. I miss constant moments of friendship and camaraderie. I miss feeling seen and heard and loved by those around me.
It’s weird right? Getting older. Things change so much as you age. The friends I had at 14 years old, people who I thought would be in my wedding party, are just a distant memory now.
It’s always something I’ve explained to myself as incompatibility.
As a kid, I had a hard time making friends and an even harder time keeping them. I was often suspicious of people and their intentions, wondering if they actually liked me or genuinely wanted to hang out. As I got older, this fear manifested into a serious anxiety that prohibited me from asking my peers to do things outside of school, lest I be bothering them. In my mind, I was the weird kid no one liked, clueless about her precarious social standing.
These fears — which were nothing more than fears — resulted in me selecting the very first people that came along, resting my whole childhood livelihood on people who simply weren’t compatible with me as a person. But now, the loss of the close companionship I have been craving is not a case of incompatibility. It is a matter of people growing apart, both literally and figuratively. While I know my friends care about me, there is no denying that our lives are very different now. As our priorities shifted, we started to grow in different directions. This is a very scary reality that I fear many people are facing now and will continue to face in the future.
I imagine that if you are here reading this, perhaps this is something you might be struggling with too. I thought long and hard about what kind of wisdom I’d like to share at the end of a story like this one, but I came up empty. I could tell you to join a club or take a yoga class; to meet people out in the world at bars or other social functions — but I don’t want to do that. Instead, I think it is best to tell you that I understand how hard it is to feel alone. To feel separated from the people you care about. I want to share with you that it is okay to be angry or sad or scared for a little while before you pick up the pieces and move on. It’s okay to take your time before you try to expand your horizons and meet new people.
Don’t hide forever but don’t forget to allow yourself a moment to grieve what you once had. A life you loved, a community you thrived in. There is no doubt that there are plenty of fish in the sea; you won’t be alone forever. Friendships come and they go, and no matter how much we want to hang on to them, the things that don’t serve us will always find a way to slip quietly out of the back door.
Eventually, that will be something you can be okay with — but give yourself the time you need to get there.