The people who are with me

“My Dad always says, ‘The people you start out with are not the people you end up with.’ You come to college and you want to be friends with everyone and do everything because it’s new and it’s shiny and it’s anything. At the end of the day, you’re going to meet a ton of people. They’re going to show themselves, and they’re going to prove themselves. They’re going to be with you, and those are the people you’re gonna contact with down the road. You might not talk to them for a decade, but when you see them you’re still going to be good friends and talk for a day. I try really hard to maintain my friendships, but if people change, people change, and that’s okay. I just keep in mind that there are people who are going to stay with me, but it’s not always the people you were best friends with freshmen year. “

“My mom talks a lot about seasons and cycles. Things change so quickly here. One semester will look dramatically different from the next one. People come and go studying abroad. There really is not routine here, even if people have a class schedule and regular meeting times. Each day varies so much from the one that came before it. I am not able to thrive if I’m holding everything like this. I just need to be open to get thrown around a little bit by the things that happen here. I know that there’s social padding around me that can sustain that. I can get knocked into you, and I’ll be fine.
I think more so than any other time in my life, I’ve realized the people who are with me. Coming to college, I wasn’t concerned about making friends because I’ve never had that issue before, but I was concerned about having a lot of people who didn’t value, didn’t put the same value in friendships or define friendships the way I do, which is a very high bar. If I call you a friend, for me, it’s like if I had my 15 minute phone call and you were the person I would call and I knew you were going to pick up I’m not saying I’ve been in jail, but I’ve had some moments in college where something was going on, maybe I wasn’t in the position to call anyone, but my friends came through for me. They showed up. Usually it was even before I began to think of them in that way. Without forcing a test on them, they just showed up.”