On leaving the first time

I was 18 and was finally stepping out into the great wide world on my own. Oh sure, there had been mini forays leading up to now, fueled by questionable connections made on the internet, but this was the first without the immediate safety net of family. I had messaged with my future roommate in the days leading up to move in day, and thought that I knew what to expect…but more on that in a bit.

I traveled the 8 hours from Delaware to South Carolina with my parents, all of my belongings packed into their van and my Dodge Intrepid. Caravaning with my dad is a lesson in not caring what other drivers you may be pissing off, but we made it without any road rage incidents. Move in day was an event, mainly because I was living on the third floor of a dorm without an elevator. My roommate was already there and had rearranged the room to her liking without any input from me…this should have been a sign.

We set up my assigned side of the room, said goodbye to my parents, and faced the difficulty of making friends on my own. I was completely out of my element. In the situation of sharing intimate space with someone I didn't know that well who had very different goals for college than me, and who was 8 months younger than me…so most of what she wanted to do was illegal for her even in South Carolina.

We tried for a few months to be roommates on the same page, mostly directed by her. I was an isolated homeschooler, what did I know about making friends and being social? I was there to learn many things about life, not just academic things.

So I went with the flow, and tried not to make waves. I get back to the room and there's two boys from the neighboring dorm over to hang out? Ok, I guess we're hanging out, and conveniently forgetting that she's supposedly engaged. She wants to watch Superstar and Night at the Roxbury on repeat ad nauseum? I would put up with it or go sit in the courtyard (aka The Triangle) and people watch. I should thank her for this, because this is ultimately how I started to branch out and learned to create my own network/community. People watching turned into interacting and meeting people on a similar wavelength of atypical - closer anyway than the fashion and sorority obsessed roommate.

She moved out about 2 months into our first semester, so I had a room to myself for the rest of the year. It was nice to have a safe haven in all of the new and challenging things going on around me, but it was also lonely. I'd never had that level of independence and isolation before. I took occasional road trips to see my cousin in Virginia and an on/off boyfriend in Florida, but that did little to assuage the lack of daily connection I was experiencing.

I tried to make connections. My class sizes were small, so it was easy to learn names and get a sense of people. The problem was that my people sense was still rusty and not tuned to the general population. This led to a number of awkward interactions and questionable connections - like the very sweet Irish exchange student who agreed to come to my dorm room and hang out for my birthday, but didn't account for how incredibly awkward I am and definitely didn't expect me to vomit in the sink after using milk as a chaser for whiskey. Or the guy with some psychopathic tendencies that I dismissed because they were…not normal to me, but not outside of the realm of expected behavior? Like, I'd never been pushed down a concrete staircase before, but I had been threatened with a bullwhip, so implied violence was not foreign to me. It just seemed like a natural progression, and something to be negotiated with and managed - not reported and shunned. I was also left wide open as an unsuspecting support target for people who thrived on drama and creating a victim persona for themselves - one of these emotional vampires latched onto me toward the middle of fall semester, I don't even remember how we met.

I still went to parties, some with the emotional vampire who I then had to babysit; some with the odd squad who watched everyone's backs including mine. Some of the parties were questionable, others were just straight up a good time - boxers and button downs is the best party theme invented, period.

But college wasn't all weird connections and parties - I was also learning about my brain and how it functions to learn.